The Cincinnati Human Relations Commission. Phillip J. Obermiller
woman while holding the man at gunpoint. Anger flared among white Cincinnatians, some of whom armed themselves, and mass meetings were called for. The MFRC tried to head off the specter of vigilantism and open violence by contacting religious and civic leaders to advise “common sense and moderation.” This tense situation was eventually defused by the interventions of both black and white leaders. Subsequently the MFRC conducted a study that found that the local press and radio had added fuel to the racial fires by their “injudicious and even hysterical” reporting on the crime. Bragdon and an MFRC board member met with Cincinnati Enquirer editor Robert Ferger and Cincinnati Times-Star editor Hulbert Taft Sr., eliciting assurances that apparent racial conflicts would be reported with more restraint in the future.
Janet E. Smith, MFRC administrative assistant, in a summary of the agency’s first five years, credited the committee with “the [resolution] of conflict and tension, thus preventing a riot in the summer of 1946. This single accomplishment alone may be said to justify the city’s ‘investment’ in MFRC, for riots can cost a city untold sums in property damage, injury, loss of life, and repair of community relations.” Clearly the MFRC did not single-handedly prevent a riot that summer, but Smith’s comment shows how much the fear of rioting still resonated in Cincinnati three years after the Detroit upheaval.
Although it shared offices with the police division’s race relations detail at city hall, the committee was frequently called upon to address issues of police harassment of black citizens. While the NAACP and other civic groups declared “war on police brutality,” the MFRC continued to take a very understated and hands-off approach. This was the committee’s stance in the 1946 case of Nathan Wright, a black ministerial student, who reported being abused and threatened by police. The police division and the city administration dismissed his accusations, inflaming the black community.
Caught in between, the MFRC decided to tread lightly, especially after city council member Gordon H. Scherer, foreshadowing the McCarthy era, suggested any criticism of the police was a Communist Party plot to “have the public lose confidence in the police departments as the opening wedge for overthrow of our government.” In later public comments Marshall Bragdon acknowledged Communist critiques of American racism, but deflected Scherer’s remarks by taking a human-relations tack: “the Communists can be answered only by millions of Americans taking up and living by the idea that the neighbor is to be respected and fairly treated, and what difference can be [sic] the color of his skin or his religion make, if he is a good man? By such behavior among Americans the Communists will be disarmed.”
In the following year Haney Bradley, a black man, was severely beaten by police. A local judge dismissed disorderly conduct charges against Bradley, commenting that he saw no reason for the beating the defendant had received. Nonetheless, the city’s safety director found no cause for disciplining the officers. In response, the Council of Churches, the NAACP, the Woman’s City Club, the Jewish Community Council, and the West End Civic League sent a letter to city council criticizing police procedures and the safety director for ignoring “social attitudes and tensions in the community.” The MFRC, although invited to be a signatory to the letter, declined to sign it. In both the Wright and the Bradley cases the committee, in keeping with its nonconfrontational, “impartial” stance, remained on the sidelines.
The committee’s stated purpose of “promoting tolerance” instead of “taking sides” also affected its actions in the area of expanding employment opportunities as a means of improving relations “among races, among religious groups, and between labor and management.” The committee adopted the stratagem of identifying employers who had integrated their workforces and proposing them as models for other companies to follow. When the West End Civic League took the more forceful position of picketing and leafleting employers resistant to integrating their workforces, the MFRC was called in as a mediator. The committee, represented by Bragdon, was marginally successful in this effort, which resulted in the hiring of two black workers and the publication of a pamphlet entitled They Do Work Together.
The MFRC continued its campaign to end discrimination in employment primarily through educational programs. As noted, it instituted its annual Friendly Relations Week in 1944, ever careful to indicate that this initiative included, but went well beyond, race relations. In 1948 the committee sponsored the local stop of the national Freedom Train, a mobile exhibition of famous documents from American history. This may have been one of the last echoes of the wartime civic unity movement; although the MFRC’s immediate interest was in promoting equality and tolerance, it apparently saw a larger role in encouraging civic unity as well.
During this time, critics saw the MFRC as either duplicative of the efforts of other organizations (e.g., NAACP, the city’s Negro Civic Welfare Association), ineffective in achieving its goals, or both. Despite attacks on the MFRC as a needless “frill” in the city budget, the city manager allocated $12,000 for the committee beginning in 1946. In 1948 two city council members balked at adding $1,000 to the MFRC’s budget for staff cost-of-living increases. The raises for Marshall Bragdon and Janet Smith rankled AFL business manager Bernie Schmidt, who wanted equal treatment for all city hall employees who were members of his union. This issue brought on the committee’s first administrative crisis and reorganization.
Caught between the union and the MFRC, city council compromised by offering to pay the committee a $15,000 lump sum to purchase its services on a contractual basis, provided the MFRC would become an independent, nonprofit organization. Despite misgivings by some MFRC board members that the agency would lose its official standing within the city, the committee incorporated as a nonprofit organization in early 1949. Marshall Bragdon noted publicly that it was still the mayor’s committee because the mayor would continue to appoint its members and that little fundamental change in the activities or role of the committee would result from its new status.
In addition to its usual advising, promoting, cooperating, educating, and publishing roles, however, the newly independent MFRC was charged under its new articles of incorporation to “receive and investigate complaints and initiate its own investigations . . . of (a) racial, religious, and ethnic group prejudice, tensions, discrimination and disorder caused thereby; (b) practices of discrimination against any person because of race, color, creed, racial origin or ancestry.” These investigations could result in nonbinding mediation or, more typically, in a report being issued. Moreover, the committee’s funding would now come from contracts with “the City of Cincinnati or other organizations,” a critical clause that would be used by both MFRC and later the CHRC to deflect charges in the 1950s and again in the 1970s of misuse of funds by the state auditor’s office.
Throughout the late 1940s the committee continued its efforts to end segregation in the Cincinnati Bar Association, the Coney Island amusement park, local movie theaters, restaurants, roller- and ice-skating rinks, and bowling alleys, as well as the physician staffs of local hospitals. It opened a borrowing library of over one thousand books, pamphlets, and other literature on intergroup relations. The MFRC also worked with the public library, local radio stations, public school teachers, and the Girl Scouts to promote intergroup tolerance and cooperation. During this time the committee helped the conversion of the Council of Social Agencies’ Division of Negro Welfare into the Cincinnati affiliate of the Urban League by donating $1,500 in discretionary monies for the new National Urban League office.
A signal event occurred in 1948, when Virginia Coffey, a native of West Virginia raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was hired as assistant director. Before joining the MFRC staff she taught in Cincinnati at the Harriet Beecher Stowe School, worked as an executive director of the West End YWCA branch, and formed the city’s first African American Girl Scout troop. Upon arriving at the MFRC she set about writing a column for various newspapers titled Speaking Out on Race Relations and giving human relations talks to civic and religious groups, social clubs, business organizations, and PTAs. With added staffing, the committee was also able to begin reorganizing its voluntary committee and membership structures, which had fallen into disarray.
While the MFRC was being organized, in autumn of 1943, a group of “Negro Organizations Interested in Racial Amity and Good City Government” sent a memo to Mayor Stewart and those active in the committee’s formation. The group wanted the new committee to focus on inequities in “such basic problem [areas]