The Cincinnati Human Relations Commission. Phillip J. Obermiller
are often expressed in behavior. To the extent that beliefs and behaviors are changed, human relations is a secular moral endeavor to help people distinguish between socially good and bad opinions and, just as important, actions.
Beyond civility, understanding, and good will, however, lie structural problems that must also be addressed, chiefly in the areas of employment, housing, education, law enforcement, and public access (recreation, entertainment, dining, governmental programs, and so on). In his insightful essay “Whither Northern Race Relations Committees?” Robert Weaver writes, “It is often suggested that the Negro should lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is usually forgotten that his feet are set in concrete. The first steps must be aimed at breaking the concrete. If a community is taking actions to improve the status of its Negro citizens, it is making the most effective contribution toward changing attitudes and behavior patterns.” These words were written in 1944, following the devastation of the Detroit race riots, just as municipal human and race relations committees were being set up in cities across the country, including Cincinnati.
This is why the Cincinnati Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee (MFRC) was founded. It brought together a large number of citizens with a wide spectrum of beliefs with the goal of using persuasion to get different groups in the city to interact with mutual respect. The committee itself provided the public with role models for cooperative behavior, along with research and educational projects meant to document adverse conditions affecting various groups in the city, and to show how they can be changed.
The MFRC was replaced by the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission (CHRC) in the 1960s, reflecting the rapid change in social relations that occurred during that decade. While some other municipal human-relations agencies moved into enforcement during this era, the CHRC remained true to its human-relations roots while becoming more involved in youth-oriented programs and establishing neighborhood contact through a cadre of field-workers.
Over a seventy-year history, first the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee then the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission have been emblematic of human-relations efforts across the nation. The agency has struggled to stay true to its own philosophy while adapting to social change, to use suasion in a culture that demands immediate and measurable results, and to operate effectively despite local political struggles. The history of the CHRC is a significant narrative within the larger civil rights movement and in the urban history of twentieth-century America. The CHRC’s story is not one of unmitigated success but one of persistence through missteps and sometimes outright failures. Recounting the CHRC’s history is not meant to valorize the commission but to document both its successes and disappointments; in doing so we acknowledge what a seemingly impossible yet necessary task improving urban human relations is. That is what this book is about.
METHOD
Throughout the volume we use the “posthole” method of historiography by focusing on themes we consider important for understanding the agency. Hundreds of boxes of archival materials spread across five libraries in three states make for some interesting reading, but we have condensed much of it for the sake of clarity and accessibility. Direct quotes from these records, reports, newsletters, speeches, memos, correspondence, and newspaper articles are presented to provide the reader with a first-person perspective; to the same end, the text includes portions of both archival and contemporary interviews with former MFRC and CHRC board and staff members. These methodological and format decisions are complemented by the detailed timeline provided in the appendices—history is made of many stories and the reader may find other compelling stories emerging from the timeline.
ORGANIZATION
This volume has been written and organized with the general reader in mind. A short preface in italics opens each chapter, summarizing selected local and national milestones (acts of Congress, executive orders, Supreme Court decisions, protests, and riots) that provide context for events in the nation and in Cincinnati that affected the agency’s actions.
Although footnotes have not been used in the text, an extensive list of the sources consulted in developing the manuscript has been appended for scholarly use. The volume flows in chronological order, each chapter describing a decade in the work of the MFRC or the CHRC. Within each chapter, however, the narrative may reference past or future events in the agency’s experience to show the interrelatedness of these circumstances. Photographs are presented to put faces on names and to highlight specific events.
The conclusion provides a broad perspective on Cincinnati’s human relations efforts, placing them in the context of the American civil rights movement, relating them to similar efforts across the nation and pointing to the key role leadership played in these endeavors. In this light, the story of the CHRC becomes a case study illustrating the value of having a subtle but insistent voice for social justice within municipal government.
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Cincinnati
1
Responding to the “Calamity in Detroit”
The 1940s
Popular belief notwithstanding, common threats such as economic downturns and external enemies did not fully unite Americans, nor did they calm ethnic, labor, or racial hostility in the United States during the twentieth century. Italians were lynched until at least 1915, Mexicans and Chinese through the 1930s, and blacks well into the 1960s. Growing ethnic antagonism resulted in severe immigration restriction laws being enacted in the early 1920s. In an effort “to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity,” federal legislation was passed to cap the numbers of Southern and Eastern European as well as African immigrants to this country; Arabs and people from East Asia and India were excluded altogether. During the 1930s anti-Semitism in the United States limited German-Jewish immigration to a mere fraction of the allotted quota, with tragic results.
In similar fashion, labor unrest often led to battles among workers and between workers and employers, some of them deadly enough to be called massacres. Between 1900 and 1999 only thirteen individual years passed without notable, often bloody, strikes in the agricultural, mining, and manufacturing sectors.
Racial conflict was also widespread. Where Jim Crow did not prevail, the Ku Klux Klan and vigilantism did. Race riots occurred throughout the century, including during the First and Second World Wars. During the Second World War, for instance, there were hundreds of major strikes, some of them to protest the hiring of black workers in defense industries. By instituting a federal Fair Employment Practice Commission, in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt narrowly averted a march on Washington by blacks protesting discriminatory defense industry hiring practices. In addition to protests by or about blacks, the century also saw anti-Greek, Hispanic/Latino, Puerto Rican, and Filipino riots. Clearly then, wars, a long period of economic depression, or intervals of prosperity and industrial growth never completely united Americans as a people.
In response to widespread prejudice and discrimination, resistance and advocacy groups sprang up throughout the twentieth century. They included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909), the National Urban League (1910), the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (1913), and more recently the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1960), the Irish American Cultural Institute (1962), the National Organization for Women (1966), the National Italian American Foundation (1975), the Human Rights Campaign (founded in 1980 as the Human Rights Campaign Fund, focusing on the election of candidates willing to treat LGBTQ issues equitably), and the American Association of People with Disabilities (1995) to name only a few. Although these dates would imply a period of quiescence through midcentury, this was not the case. For instance, the Congress of Racial Equality was founded in 1942 and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957.
Just as important, another thread of state and local activism, sometimes called the Civic Unity Movement, began to appear. Writing in 1951, the director of the Center for Human Relations Studies in New York, Dan W. Dodson, noted,
It