The Cincinnati Human Relations Commission. Phillip J. Obermiller
status of Negro citizens. It was also clear that in addition to the national aspect of the issue, it was also a community problem. Another revelation was the fact that municipal governments were woefully unprepared and inexperienced either to understand the problem or to deal with it. These conditions led to a new instrumentality of municipal government, namely, a commission in the office of the mayor composed of leading citizens charged with the responsibility of doing what they could to promote better intergroup relations within the community.
In this vein Maryland, which had instituted an Interracial Commission in 1927, renamed it in 1943 the Commission to Study Problems Affecting the Colored Population. In Detroit the Mayor’s Interracial Committee was founded in late 1943, the same year Los Angeles set up a Joint Committee for Interracial Progress, Chicago started its Mayor’s Committee on Race Relations, and St. Louis began a Race Relations Commission. New York City set up the Mayor’s Committee on Unity and Seattle started its Civic Unity Committee in 1944, while the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations was founded in 1951. Spurred by the rise of racial tensions during the Second World War, by 1950 there were fifty-two municipal “intergroup relations” committees operating in seventeen states. In the words of one commentator, “Every week, it seemed, some new program of intercultural education, or interracial good-will, or another council on unity and amity appeared.”
It is against this backdrop that the Cincinnati Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee (MFRC) was formed—not only as the local manifestation of a national trend, but more specifically in response to developments in Detroit.
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In the summer of 1943 Cincinnati was worried. Earlier in the year, race rioting in Detroit had left thirty-four people dead, hundreds injured, and portions of the city in ashes. Racial tensions in Cincinnati were no different than in its smoldering counterpart to the north. Black women and men were engaged in the war effort as soldiers and defense workers, but most of Cincinnati’s synagogues, churches, neighborhoods, and schools remained segregated, while discrimination was the norm in local government, labor unions, colleges, restaurants, swimming pools, skating rinks, hospitals, department stores, amusement parks, and movie theaters. Blacks in Cincinnati were just as frustrated with the racial status quo as their counterparts in Detroit.
Two months after the Detroit riot Arnold B. Walker, writing in the Division of Negro Welfare Bulletin, posed the question on everyone’s mind: “Will There Be a Race Riot in Cincinnati?” Despite his acknowledgment of the prevailing racial tensions in the city, Walker concluded there would be no race riot in the city.
Nonetheless, the specter of Detroit loomed large in Cincinnati. Walker participated in a meeting with NAACP members and Mayor James G. Stewart just over two weeks after the Detroit riot to discuss ways to avoid similar turmoil in Cincinnati; the meeting was promoted under the heading This Must Not Happen Here. In the meeting it was agreed the mayor should convene a cross-section of citizens to form a “citizens committee on unity.” On October 7, Stewart convened a group with representation from the Division of Negro Welfare, B’nai B’rith, the Council of Churches, the Public Recreation Commission, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Catholic Charities, the Chamber of Commerce, and the black professional men in the Frontier Club with the aim of forming an intergroup relations committee sponsored by the city. On November 17 the Cincinnati City Council approved formation of the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee (MFRC).
The city had a history of human relations initiatives before the immediate crisis of the Detroit riot, including those initiated by the Negro Civic Welfare Association (which later became the Greater Cincinnati Urban League) and the Woman’s City Club of Greater Cincinnati (WCC). By 1927, for instance, the WCC had a race relations committee that actively promoted interracial understanding across the city, and in the early 1940s it founded the Fellowship House, an integrated organization dedicated to promoting interracial and ecumenical cooperation. Virginia Coffey, who would join the MFRC as assistant director in 1948, was an active participant in Fellowship House programs and was among the earliest black women admitted to membership in the Woman’s City Club, in the late 1940s. Three presidents of the WCC would serve on the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee, while others would serve on its successor, the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission. Although not directly rooted in the work of the WCC, these agencies would certainly be influenced by it. That influence apparently ran both ways because in the 1960s Coffey and her successor as assistant director at the MFRC, Eugene Sparrow, would be invited to speak at the WCC’s civic luncheon on race and other human relations issues.
In addition to promoting racial peace and wartime cooperation, the MFRC was committed to a pluralistic vision of society in which all race and culture (if not class) groups were considered of equal value. Tolerance and a respect for differences were to be promoted over prejudice and discrimination. The committee planned to do this by means of education, persuasion, and persistent effort, a form of gradualism that did not involve protest, resistance, or public demonstrations. Thus the MFRC was designed from the outset to be a subtle behind-the-scenes actor, an advisory body skilled in mediation but having no enforcement powers. The Cincinnati Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee was not unique but rather part of a national trend in setting up government-sponsored human relations organizations.
One hundred and nine citizens were appointed to the committee at its founding, of whom sixteen constituted a working Executive Committee. This unwieldy group initially led by its volunteer “secretary,” Robert Segal of the Jewish Community Relations Council, met for lunch each month at the Ninth and Walnut Street YWCA “because that was the only place downtown that would serve blacks and whites together.” The committee had no formal staff, operated with a $100 budget, and was thus often unable to respond effectively to the issues it was meant to address. But the group was able to organize and publish a newsletter, Building Together, and put on a luncheon honoring Paul Robeson, the athlete, actor, attorney, and activist.
The larger committee was broken down into subcommittees that “attacked such basic matters as employment, housing, schools, health, recreation, civil rights and police protection.” But even in its early years the committee’s efforts generated skepticism: “The more cynical and less progressive forces who become impatient often criticize this type of Citizen’s Committee, saying they delay in tackling urgent problems.” The skeptics may have had a point—“attacking” was a bit of hyperbole for the calm discussion, education, research, and persuasion that lay at the heart of the MFRC’s agenda.
By 1944 the MFRC had organized a Friendly Relations Week (September 17–24), the highlight of which was a daylong Race Relations Institute featuring the executive secretary of the NAACP, Walter White. The committee’s status began to improve after the city manager appropriated $10,000 for the MFRC’s annual budget, and the committee opened an office in City Hall where Martha Ong acted as temporary executive director. With a budget in hand, the group set about looking for a permanent director.
Marshall Bragdon became the full-time executive director in 1945, a position he would hold for the next twenty years. In Bragdon’s words, “a New York friend introduced me to Jeffrey Lazarus of Shillito’s [now Macy’s], who was hunting for an executive for Cincinnati’s young Friendly Relations Committee. He rashly decided I might do; the Committee said OK; and I rashly accepted.”
Born in Minneapolis, Bragdon attended Harvard as an undergraduate until forced to drop out by corrective surgery for the complications of polio he contracted in childhood. He went on to graduate from Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, and later became an editorial writer for the Springfield (MA) Republican, where he often wrote about reducing conflicts among social groups and the need to promote equality among all citizens. In addition to his work for the MFRC, Bragdon would become a founder and officer of the National Association of Intergroup Relations Officials and end his career as a consultant for the Community Relations Service of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The MFRC announced early on that it would not function as a black advocacy group. As Bragdon noted, “we are not working for the welfare of any one group, but are fostering improvements in conditions . . . which will safeguard the rights of all citizens.” Nevertheless, its attention was almost entirely focused on race relations by the latter half of the 1940s.
In