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Philip Spiess
CINCINNATI’S AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY: Part VIII: “Cincinnati’s African-American Reformers”
[Note: Again I apologize for the length of this piece, which I’ve tried to keep as short as possible, but it was hard to edit out information which I thought was important, this being possibly the most important piece of the series, particularly in these current days. However, it is also the last of the series.]
Cincinnati’s African-American Reformers: The cause of political and social reform, African-American or otherwise, never did run smooth, as this record will attest. Attempts at reform also engender reactions, sometimes very negative ones, and so this history will include some ups and downs, a situation which has not ended yet. But I hope to offer some highlights, that is, a brief record of the major players and their successes and achievements. Along the way, we will be discussing civic organizations, white and black, and local African-American political and sociological organizations specifically.
Peter H. Clark: I have mentioned Peter H. Clark in passing several times in previous installments [Part II, as the source for the history of the Black Brigade; Part V, as a school principal; and Part VII, as father of a musician and music teacher]. Let me now address him directly, as one of Cincinnati’s earliest and major African-American reformers. Peter Humphries Clark (1829-1925) was born in Cincinnati in 1829. His father was a successful local barber, who sent his son to private schools, simply because – well, because there were no public schools; nevertheless, he attended the early Gilmore High School [see Part V]. In 1849, when his father died, Peter took over his father’s barber shop for awhile, and he also served as a “conductor” on the “Underground Railroad” (he married Frances Ann Williams in 1854). He apprenticed as a printer, but 1849 being the year that the Ohio state legislature authorized the creation of black public schools [see Part V], due largely to the efforts of Peter’s uncle, John Isom Gaines, a prominent Cincinnati black merchant who supplied provisions to Ohio River steamboats [see Part V], by 1852 Peter became the first teacher in Cincinnati’s first black public school. However, he was fired in 1853 by the white Board of Education for publicly praising Thomas Paine (!). He then became an abolitionist publisher, editor, writer, and speaker, editing and publishing, in 1855, his own newspaper, Herald of Freedom, which did not last very long. He then edited a Free-Soil Party journal in Newport, Kentucky, but by 1856 he was on the staff of Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In 1857 he was hired by the black trustees of the new colored schools in Cincinnati and made principal of the Western District School; at some point, he apparently founded a union for black teachers (how long this lasted, I do not know). In 1866 Clark became principal of Gaines High School [see Part V] and remained there until 1886, training many black teachers, when he was forced to resign on political grounds (this was the year before separate black schools were abolished by the state of Ohio [see Part V]). Thereupon Clark left Cincinnati in 1887, moving to Alabama; in 1888 he moved to St. Louis, where he died in 1925.
But Clark’s educational activities are only part of the story; he was also heavily involved in politics. He participated in the Ohio Conventions of Colored Men, and in 1853 he was appointed by Frederick Douglass to be secretary of the National Convention of Colored Men in Syracuse, New York, where he drafted the constitution of the National Equal Rights League. Also in 1853, Clark was involved in the first fugitive slave case in Ohio: a freed black man was taken into custody by men claiming he was an escaped slave; Clark obtained a writ of habeas corpus from Judge John McLean so the case could go to court. Unfortunately, the case was unsuccessful and the man was forced back into slavery. Clark was a member of the Republican Party from about 1856 (that’s near its beginning in 1854) to 1872, but in 1876 he joined the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, forerunner of the Socialist Labor Party of America. In 1877 he spoke in Cincinnati to a crowd of thousands in support of strikers in the “Great Railroad Strike,” denouncing the suppression of the strikers by the state. Although the local press condemned the speech, it was well received by the Socialists, and so Clark ran as a Workingmen’s Party candidate for state school commissioner that same year, becoming the first black Socialist to run for office in the United States. He was not elected, but he did win about 8,000 votes! The following year Clark ran for Congress in Ohio’s 1st Congressional District on the Workingmen’s Party ticket, one of the party’s first Congressional candidates, getting 275 votes. But he left the Socialist Labor Party in 1879, stating “The welfare of the Negro is my controlling political motive”; he doubted that the Party he was leaving felt the same. But before he left Cincinnati (1887), in 1882 he aided Hamilton County Democrats in drawing up a civil rights bill, which, in due course, was passed into law.
Robert James Harlan: Colonel Robert J. Harlan (1816-1897), a civil rights activist and politician in Cincinnati, was, it seems, of mixed ancestry, being born a Southern slave but with a white father. He was probably born in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, his father being the slave owner of his mother (Mary Harlan) and him as well. As his mother was also of mixed race, Robert was not easily identifiable as being black (a quadroon, as the phrase used to be). Somewhere between the ages of three and eight, Robert and his mother were sent to Cincinnati, this journey being made on foot. When they reached Danville, Kentucky, they learned that Robert’s father had died, and they were seized as part of his property (somehow bad news travels fast, doesn’t it?). Robert was purchased by James Harlan of Danville, a man who dealt in dry goods and was a lawyer and politician, serving Kentucky in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1835 to 1839; it was then that Robert took the name of Harlan. (James Harlan’s white son, John Marshall Harlan, served as a U. S. Supreme Court Justice from 1877 to 1911 and was known as the “Great Dissenter” for his support of civil rights against the majority segregationist court.)
Robert was unique among James Harlan’s slaves, in that he was sent to school in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, along with Harlan’s own sons, but a black janitor notified the school that Robert was black, and he was sent home (why, you might ask, did he "notify the school"?). Nevertheless, Robert was close to James’s older sons (Richard and James), and when they came home from school he would study their lessons. Later (I condense his career here), he began buying and racing Kentucky racehorses and gambling on horses throughout the South, and he had great success in this endeavor. When his “father,” James Harlan, moved to Frankfort in 1840 to become Kentucky’s Secretary of State, Robert moved to Lexington, where the records state he was a “free man of color.” But about this time the Rev. John Tibbs was tarred and feathered and run out of Kentucky for his work educating black children, and so Robert Harlan decided Lexington was not a safe place to live, and he moved his family (which he had by this time) to Louisville.
But now it emerged that Robert’s de facto “emancipation” was illegal, and so, in 1848, his “master/father,” James Harlan, went to the Franklin County courthouse and freed Robert. (Later, uncertain about his freedom, even though he was now wealthier than his former slave owner, he paid James Harlan $500 for his freedom.) Although James died in 1863, Robert and James’s white sons continued to be in close contact (James Harlan, Jr., sought financial assistance from Robert in the 1880s). Robert continued to deal in racehorses, being very successful in California at the height of the Gold Rush (making much money), but he moved back to Cincinnati sometime after 1849. There he began working as a philanthropist for Cincinnati’s African-Americans, becoming a trustee of the city’s colored schools and negotiating with Nicholas Longworth for the building of the Eastern District School [see Installment V]. Speculating in Cincinnati real estate, he earned enough to purchase Ball’s Photographic and Daguerreotype Gallery [see Installment III], where he employed a number of well-known (white) photographers, including Charles Waldack, James Landy, and Leon Van Loo (I have several of their original photographs of Cincinnati landmarks in my collection). In the interests of space I won’t go into Harlan’s horse racing career in England (one of his winning horses was named “Cincinnati”); I’ll just note that his American investments lost most of their value during the Civil War, and so he returned to Cincinnati in 1869, quickly becoming an important figure in Cincinnati politics.
In 1870, for the first time, blacks were elected as delegates to the Cincinnati Republican Convention, Robert Harlan being among them. That same year, Cincinnati black citizens formed the 2nd Ohio Militia Battalion, Harlan gaining control of the regiment (after some in-fighting), as well as the title “Colonel.” By 1872, when the presidential campaign of General Ulysses S. Grant (an Ohioan) on the Republican ticket was in full swing, Harlan served on the Finance Committee of the Grant Club. Harlan had become a friend of Grant through Ohio Congressman John Sherman (brother of Civil War General William Sherman), with whom he shared a love of horses. At the State Colored Convention in 1872, Harlan and Peter Clark [see above] were strongly divided over whether black Ohioans should support Republican efforts for civil rights, or if the Republican leadership was taking advantage of the black support; Harlan spoke strongly in support of the Republicans. As a result, he was elected a delegate to the 1872 Republican National Convention. In December of that year, he was also a delegate to the National Colored Convention in Washington, D. C. Therefore, in 1873, President Grant appointed Harlan mail agent at large, and Harlan continued to support the Republican Party, calling on former General Benjamin Butler, as author of the Civil Rights Act, to clarify its scope; this became a national story (Harlan’s half-brother by "adoption," Justice John Marshall Harlan, being the lone Supreme Court Justice to support various civil rights cases in 1883).
Harlan usually served as a prominent member of many Colored National Conventions, such as those in 1876 and 1879 in Nashville, Tennessee, and that in Chicago in 1890, called the “Colored Congress,” which became the founding meeting of the National Afro-American League, as well as the one in 1892 in Cincinnati. Besides all that, Harlan was elected an alternate delegate for the Ohio delegation to the Republican National Conventions in 1884 and 1888, led by his friend (and future president) William McKinley. In 1881 Harlan ran for the Ohio State House of Representatives from Hamilton County, but lost; his statement afterwards was that “while blacks in Cincinnati voted for the white Republicans in the race [giving them the victory], white Republicans did not vote for him [leading to his loss].” But in 1885, he ran again for the same seat, and again lost, but the Democrat winner, A. P. Butterfield, was ousted by a House committee, and Harlan was given the seat in 1886 [sounds like “Musical Chairs,” doesn’t it?]. As a state legislator, Harlan opposed segregated schooling [see Installment V], and he was defeated for the seat by William Copeland [see below] in 1887. Nevertheless, despite being out of office, Harlan was an outspoken critic of Southern lynchings. In late 1889, Harlan was appointed an inspector of U. S. Customs, and later was special inspector for the U. S. Treasury Department (until 1893, when President Cleveland, a Democrat, removed him from office). Finally, it might be mentioned that Harlan occasionally wrote poetry.
William H. Copeland: “Bill” Copeland (1848-1931) was born in Columbus, Ohio, and, while still a teenager, joined the Quartermaster Department of the Union forces during the Civil War; he was a messenger of the Union forces to General Grant at Vicksburg. After the war, he became a porter and then a brakeman on the Ohio & Pennsylvania Railroad; he is generally believed to have been the first African-American parlor car conductor. Later, in Cincinnati, he owned and operated a popular café and opened an undertaking establishment. Entering city politics [see Installment VI], he served as assistant market master of the city, as a surveyor in the city waterworks, and he was deputy sheriff of Hamilton County for twenty years. A member of the Episcopal church, he rose to be a 32nd Degree Mason, and became a Past Commander of the State of Ohio Knights Templar. During the Chester Arthur administration, Copeland became the first African-American to serve as a U. S. Gauger (exciseman). In his political career in Cincinnati, he was one of the four founders of the Young Men’s Blaine Club, a Republican organization; he was elected to the State Legislature of Ohio, serving his Cincinnati district in the General Assembly from 1888 to 1889.
Wendell Phillips Dabney: I wrote at length about Wendell Phillips Dabney, major African-American reformer in Cincinnati in Installment VI, so I won’t repeat it here. “Machine politics” may not sound much like “reform,” but the fact that the Republican Party was taking into its fold Cincinnati’s African-Americans, even though it may have been exploiting them, was giving the city’s blacks a new power in politics that they had not had before. Wendell Phillips Dabney apparently knew how to mold that power to serve the people of his race (largely through his newspaper, The Union). In order to understand the political discussion ahead, you may wish to review the sections in that installment on the (basically white) political history of Cincinnati, especially the parts on “machine politics.”
Jennie D. Porter: I have already written a bit about Jennie Porter at Posts #4691 and #4696 on the WHHS Forum, but let me now expand on her role as an educational reformer. Jennie Davis Porter (1876-1936) was a native Cincinnatian, her father being Cincinnati’s first African-American undertaker (the first of many); her mother was a school teacher. Graduating from the old Hughes High School in the West End in 1893, she herself went into teaching. She ran a private kindergarten for African-American children (supported by Annie Laws – see Installment V) in the old Hughes High School (the new Hughes High School had opened in Clifton Heights in 1910). Later she became a teacher at the Douglass School [see Installment V]. During the great Ohio River flood of 1913, when she tried to find a temporary school for African-American children whom the flood had displaced (you can imagine that many of Cincinnati’s African-Americans lived in the low-lying areas along the river), she discovered that many of the children had no school to go to in the first place! So in 1914 the Cincinnati School Board allowed her to open the Harriet Beecher Stowe School with 350 students (she was its first principal, and remained so until her death); by 1923, the school had grown so rapidly (1,300 students in 1922) that she opened a new building for the Stowe School [see Post #4696 for the very interesting physical details of the school, which closed in 1962, but which continues to be used as the local Fox 9 television station]. It became the largest public school in Cincinnati ("irrespective of race," my source says), having 3,080 pupils (including Sinton Park and Jackson Colonies, also under Miss Porter).
While principal of the Stowe School Porter pursued her college education, enrolling at the University of Cincinnati in 1918 as one of a very few African-American students, gaining her Bachelor’s degree in 1923, her Master’s degree in 1925, and her doctoral degree in 1928, becoming the first African-American woman to earn the Ph.D. degree at the University of Cincinnati. But in her day Jennie Porter was a very controversial figure in the Cincinnati schools, tangling with the school board and also with Wendell Phillips Dabney, because she believed that black children should be educated in segregated schools in order to achieve their full potential, away from the prejudices of white children and white teachers. (Dabney felt that encouraging segregated schools would expand the practice of segregation elsewhere in society.) According to Wendell Phillips Dabney [Post #4696], Stowe School was "the only school in the city organized on a psychological basis to prove statistically that the Negro is not mentally inferior." What this meant (apparently) was described by Dabney in the entry on "The New Harriet Beecher Stowe School" in his 1926 Cincinnati's Colored Citizens (page 235): "The school is reorganized on a psychological basis and is now functioning (1) in providing equality of opportunity for all; (2) in providing the educational training that will be most valuable both for the individual and from the standpoint of society; (3) in providing teachers who are specialists not only of their particular subject, but also of human nature; (4) in providing classification of pupils according to their intelligence, followed up by a carefully planned program of educational guidance. The classification is a means by which problems become isolated, studied and solved psychologically for the good of the child, society and the state." Despite much criticism, Jennie Porter created one of the most important educational opportunities for African-Americans in Cincinnati.
African-American Reform Groups in Cincinnati: Among the first of such groups was the “True Reformers,” which (according to Dabney) “sprang up almost in a night,” being founded in the Dabney Building on McAllister Street [see Installment VI], and which attained a membership of about two thousand; it later bought a hall on West Sixth Street. Aiming at political and social reform, it then had a dramatic failure when its national office in Richmond, Virginia, defaulted on its funds. The Cincinnati branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was established in 1915 (Wendell Phillips Dabney was its first president) with 15-20 members, because, at the time, the organization was considered radical and its members were often afraid of losing their jobs if it was known that they were members. As a result, the group met in members’ homes. Originally it had, in its early days (according to Dabney), “a large and loyal membership,” but interest in it gradually died, as “the fight for race rights and against race abuses generally appeals only to those who realize the value of such action.” Nevertheless, among its early successes was the abolishment of a segregated school system; it also achieved breakthroughs in employment and public accommodations by using the power of the courts and public persuasion through publicity. I might also add that twice (in 1913 and 1925) interracial marriage bills were brought up in the Ohio State legislature; Wendell P. Dabney, among those leading the NAACP delegation opposing the bills, got them defeated in committee. Despite the early decline in membership, by the mid-1960s membership had grown into the thousands, and (as some of us may recall), demonstrations and “sit-ins” had become established ways of accomplishing the association’s goals. The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA, 1914), commonly known as the “Garvey Movement” (after Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican black who came to the United States in 1916, and through mass meetings encouraged African-Americans to develop a separate society and stand against racial injustice; his radical ideas fueled controversy in the 1920s), had a large following in Cincinnati, having a headquarters on George Street.
When in 1896 the U. S. Supreme Court approved segregation in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, the theory of “separate but equal” (though in most cases we know it was not equal) spread throughout many aspects of American society, especially in the South, causing the great migration of African-Americans to northern cities. In order to assist these migrant citizens in finding economic opportunities and to reduce discrimination, in 1910 the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes was founded in New York City; this later became the National Urban League. A similar agency, founded in 1917 (known by several names over time; from 1936 to 1948, it was known as the Negro Welfare Division, Cincinnati Community Chest) was a predecessor to the local chapter of the National Urban League, known today as the Urban League of Greater Cincinnati (established 1948). Its stated mission was “to plan for, assist, encourage and engage in the improvement of economic, social, educational and cultural conditions of the Negro population.” Two of its early trustees were Ted Berry [see below] and William McClain [see below]; now a United Way agency, it continues to serve the whole Cincinnati community.
A Brief Note on The Cincinnatus Association and the Charter Party: I wrote in Installment VI of Cincinnati “machine politics” in the Gilded Age of the latter half of the 19th century, particularly of the “Boss Cox machine.” But by 1916 George B. Cox was dead, and his Republican political “machine” was in the less capable hands of his two lieutenants. By 1920, the Cincinnati Times-Star, the Republican newspaper controlled by the Taft family (Charles P. Taft, the President’s half-brother, and Charles P. Taft’s nephew, Hulbert Taft Sr.) was calling for the reform of Cincinnati’s government. Victor Heintz, a Cincinnati political organizer for the Republican National Committee, concerned about the corruption he saw in Cincinnati, in 1920 brought together a group of reform-minded businessmen, who called themselves The Cincinnatus Association (after the ancient Roman general, Lucius Cincinnatus, a statue of whom stands on the Public Landing at Sawyer Point). This organization began to push for civic improvement, politically and economically; it continues to do so today. It helped form the City Charter Party, founded in 1924, which in 1925 enacted a new municipal charter, establishing the city manager form of government and a nine-member City Council; it also replaced political patronage with a civil service bureaucracy. It is under these circumstances that the later reformers were able to take action.
Theodore M. Berry: Ted Berry (1904-2000) a distinguished reformer in Cincinnati through the Charter Party, a national leader in the Civil Rights movement, and eventually the first African-American mayor of Cincinnati, was born into poverty in Maysville, Kentucky, and graduated from Woodward High School in 1924, where he served as class valedictorian, the first African-American to be so honored in Cincinnati. In his senior year, he won an essay contest with an entry submitted under the name of Thomas Playfair (note the meaning of the last name in this pseudonym), after an all-white panel had rejected his initial essay. Graduating from the University of Cincinnati (paying tuition by working in the steel mills of Newport, Kentucky), he then attended the University of Cincinnati College of Law, being admitted to the Ohio Bar in 1932. From 1932 to 1946 Berry served as president of the Cincinnati branch of the NAACP [see above], and in 1938 he was appointed the first black assistant prosecuting attorney of Hamilton County. During World War II, Berry worked in the Office of War Information in Washington, D. C., at which time he changed from membership in the Republican Party to membership in the Democratic Party. In 1945, Ted Berry defended three black Army Air Force officers, members of the Tuskegee Airmen, who had protested a segregated officers’ club in Indiana, winning acquittal for two of the men (the third was pardoned in 1995). Berry also served on the Ohio Committee for Civil Rights Legislation of the NAACP, working on fair housing and equal employment issues; in such work, he connected with the Urban League of Greater Cincinnati [see above].
But Ted Berry is also known for his political career in Cincinnati. This began in 1947 when he ran for a seat on the Cincinnati City Council; although he lost then, he won in 1949. By 1953 he was chairman of the Council’s finance committee, where he led a battle to create a city income tax. In 1955 he was elected Vice Mayor of Cincinnati. When he created the Community Action Commission of Cincinnati, he caught the attention of Sargent Shriver, President Kennedy’s brother-in-law and one of his advisors. Thus in 1965 President Lyndon Johnson appointed Berry as head of the Office of Economic Opportunity’s Community Action Programs, which included the Jobs Corps, Head Start, and Legal Services. In 1969, Berry returned to Cincinnati and regained a seat on the City Council in 1971. In 1972 he was elected the first African-American Mayor of Cincinnati, in which post he served for four years. He later sought to return Cincinnati to its earlier political election system of proportional representation, believing it gave more power to black voters. Berry received the William Howard Taft Americanism Award of the Anti-Defamation League in 1990. He died at the age of 94; both Theodore Berry Way and the Theodore M. Berry International Friendship Park (on Riverside Drive east of downtown) in Cincinnati are named for him.
William A. McClain: A graduate of Springfield High School in Springfield, Ohio, William Andrew McClain (1913-2014) later earned professional degrees from Wittenberg University and the University of Michigan, receiving LL.D. degrees from Wilberforce University and the University of Cincinnati. He was best known as Cincinnati’s City Solicitor (from 1963 through 1972), being the first African-American in the United States to attain such a significant municipal legal office. He became a judge, first in the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas (1975-1976) and then in the Municipal Court of Hamilton County (1976-1980). Judge McClain also served as a trustee of the Urban League of Greater Cincinnati [see above], and he was known as a lecturer on legal and urban matters. He was elevated to the 33rd Degree of Masonry and became the Grand Master of the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Ohio (the African-American branch of the Masonic Order), founding the Progressive Black Masonry Movement within the Masons and the Order of the Eastern Star.
Lawrence C. Hawkins: Born in South Carolina in 1919, the son of a sharecropper, Lawrence Hawkins moved with his family to Cincinnati in 1926. Becoming a student at the Frederick Douglass School [see Installment V], he later graduated from Walnut Hills High School and the University of Cincinnati. World War II saw him joining the Army Infantry, where he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant; he then transferred to the Army Air Force Navigation School and then to bombardier school. There he was assigned to the famous Tuskegee Airmen, the first unit of African-American fliers in World War II. After the war he became a teacher in the Cincinnati public schools, but he continued his studies, eventually earning his Ph.D. degree from the University of Cincinnati. In 1957 he became principal (still at that time one of the very few African-American ones) of Samuel Ach Jr. High School in Avondale, which by that time had predominantly black students. He became a mentor to his teachers, eight of them eventually becoming principals. (His son, Lawrence "Lonnie" Hawkins, was in the WHHS Class of '62.). In 1964 he established the Cincinnati Public School Division of Educational Opportunity, and in 1967 he became an assistant superintendent of schools in his district (a district where the 1967 Cincinnati race riots occurred [see Installment I]). In 1969 Dr. Hawkins was appointed Professor of Education and Community Services at the University of Cincinnati, becoming the founding Dean of the College of Community Services and the first African-American dean at UC. Here he became “embroiled in questions of Women’s Liberation,” as the administration of UC thought that “women’s studies” should be in the College of Community Services. Nevertheless, Dr. Hawkins was appointed Vice President for Continuing Education and Metropolitan Affairs, shortly being elevated to Senior Vice President of UC in 1976. However, by the early 1980s the College of Community Services was abolished and UC still had only one African-American dean – in the two-year University College, which itself was abolished in the next decade. Dr. Hawkins was moved to emeritus status in 1984. After his retirement from UC, he served as chair of the Mayor’s Police Community Relations Panel, and he served on the boards of the Cincinnati branch of the Federal Reserve Bank, the Ohio Citizens’ Council for Health and Welfare, Bethesda Hospital, WCET television station, and the Western and Southern Financial Group. He also played a major role in the creation of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati (founded 1994; opened 2004), and, shortly before his death in 2009, the Western and Southern Group created an award in his name to honor an educator in the Cincinnati public schools.
Marian A. Spencer: Born in Gallipolis, Ohio, in 1920, Marian Regelia Alexander Spencer and her family lived with her grandfather, a freed slave from West Virginia. She became a member of the NAACP at the age of 13, thus beginning a long career as a civil rights activist. In 1938 she moved to Cincinnati to attend the University of Cincinnati, graduating in 1942, and campaigning for the prom to be open to all students. Marrying Donald a. Spencer, a Cincinnati school teacher, she had two sons. In 1952 her sons heard a radio ad inviting children to Coney Island Amusement Park to meet a local television personality. Calling the park to ask if all children were invited and adding, “We are Negroes,” she learned that African-Americans were barred from the park. (Mrs. Spencer was turned away from the park’s front gate by a guard brandishing a gun on the Fourth of July, 1952.) Mrs. Spencer immediately filed a civil rights lawsuit (NAACP Legal Action vs. Coney Island, Cincinnati, Ohio) and ultimately won the case, which eventually desegregated Coney Island in 1955. [This date sounds way too early to me, as I seem to recall from my youth that this segregation continued in some fashion into the 1960s; I have written briefly much earlier on this Forum about Coney Island’s barring blacks, so I may do a longer piece on this subject at some point.] She also successfully desegregated the YWCA, for whom she helped raise $3.8 million dollars. Spencer continued her civil rights activism over her entire career, working to desegregate the public schools, becoming a life member of the NAACP, and, in 1981, becoming the first female president of the NAACP’s local chapter. She also served as chairperson of the Community Steering Committee for Indigent Defense and of the Ohio Civil Rights Commission. In 1983, she was elected to the Cincinnati City Council as a Charterite, being the first African-American woman to be elected to the Council, serving one term and serving as Vice Mayor. She also served as president of the Woman’s City Club and on the University of Cincinnati’s Board of Trustees. Receiving many awards for her activist work, in 2010 the Cincinnati Public Schools renamed an elementary school in Walnut Hills the Donald A. and Marian Spencer Education Center; in 2016 the 100 block of Walnut Street between Theodore Berry Way and Second Street at The Banks was named “Marian Spencer Way,” and in 2018 the University of Cincinnati named a new residence hall “Marian Spencer Hall.” Marian Spencer died in 2019.
A Final Summation: To sum up this series, let me quote NAACP Cincinnati president [in 2003] Calvert H. Smith, who said, “[I]f the deceased warriors in the fight for freedom for African Americans could return to this city today, they would literally be amazed to discover that we are still confronted with some of the very same problems they thought they had conquered some 40 to 50 years ago” (– and so we end this series on that exclamation point!).
[See “Guide to African American Resources at the Cincinnati History Library and Archives,” Cincinnati Museum Center, for many of these individuals; see also “Walnut Hills History,” Walnut Hills Historical Society (the suburb, not the high school).]
[This is the final part of this 8-part series, “Cincinnati’s African-American History.” (Mr. Lounds, I hope I have done your request justice.)]
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