The Cincinnati Human Relations Commission. Phillip J. Obermiller
problems faced by blacks, of which rioting was only a symptom. The memo writers went on to note, “Whatever action is assumed by this committee, it should be clearly understood and publicized, we do not regard ourselves as a committee to ward off race riots. We do not expect rioting in Cincinnati” (emphasis in original). Nevertheless, Marshall Bragdon saw the Detroit riot and the tensions arising from the 1946 rape incident in Cincinnati as danger signs. In his words, “A riot-preventative was the first idea of the MFRC’s role . . . we turned the corner safely [in 1946]. But a flare-up was too close for comfort.” This is why he thought it prudent to establish an “emergency committee to act in [the] event of race riots” in 1949 in the wake of rioting in St. Louis when that city decided to integrate its oldest and largest swimming pool. The “Negro Organizations” that wrote the memo were prescient on two counts: no riots would occur in Cincinnati for another eighteen years, but the underlying problems of racial discrimination in housing, health and welfare, employment, and recreation, to name a few, would only continue to fester.
An informal evaluation of the MFRC’s first five years shows little progress made in civil rights, police-community relations, and countering anti-Semitism, or in integrating employment, housing, health care, and recreational facilities. Nevertheless, Janet E. Smith ended her summary of the committee’s first five years of activities with this insightful observation:
Progress in human relations cannot be charted precisely; nor can the causes—the reasons for a success—be measured. All we can say is, the existence and the work of the MFRC has been helping the community to reduce discrimination and increase positive understanding between groups. This five-year history gives abundant evidence of such help, even though we cannot always estimate MFRC’s exact contribution in each case.
The MFRC ended the 1940s true to its subtle roles of research, education, mediation, and persuasion. The committee’s passive efforts were not satisfactory to some, and other groups took a more aggressive stance; for instance, the Cincinnati Citizen’s Committee for Human Rights, formed in 1945, successfully began “visiting” restaurants that discriminated against black patrons. Nevertheless, the MFRC’s policy of gradualism and discretion would enable it to continue its mission despite the chilling effects of early-1950s McCarthyism.
2
Intervening “in and between Crises”
The 1950s
The 1950s saw important progress toward desegregation at the national level. In Henderson v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated seating on railroad dining cars denied the equal access to public accommodations guaranteed by the Interstate Commerce Act. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the court ruled that public school segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, the court went on to rule that a public institution of higher learning could not treat a student differently because of his or her race. Accompanied by white protests and riots, the University of Alabama became integrated, as did Little Rock Central High School despite interference from Arkansas’s Governor Orval Faubus. The organizational foundation for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was laid in Atlanta. In 1957 the Cincinnati Enquirer published a four-part series on Appalachian migrants in the city; the lead article for the series shared the front page with another article headlined “Civil Rights Pact Is Proposed.”
Even with these signs of progress, however, racial atrocities were still being committed: Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American youth visiting from Chicago, was beaten then shot to death in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi; the two white men charged with his murder were acquitted. Four years later Mack Charles Parker, an African American man accused of raping a white woman, was taken from jail by a mob in Poplarville, Mississippi, and lynched.
. . .
Marshall Bragdon opened the decade by reaffirming the MFRC’s philosophy of how to achieve social change in remarks at its sixth annual meeting: “We must think of the prejudiced person as one needing help and education. Also, we realize that most discriminatory customs and arrangements will yield only to gradual but energetic treatment.”
The committee’s prestige would grow throughout the 1950s. Its 1949 annual meeting was attended by about a hundred people, and local news reporters noted those present included no representatives of the judiciary or the police division, only one city council member, a cameo appearance by the mayor, and very few blacks. Notably absent were representatives of the University of Cincinnati, where “the university band was all white, the College of Medicine had not admitted a Negro student in ten years, [and] the school still schedules games with Southern institutions which won’t permit U.C. Negro athletes to play.” But attendance at the 1952 annual meeting grew to 270, and by 1954 the MFRC celebrated its tenth anniversary by sending out seventeen hundred invitations eliciting attendance by delegates from 175 different organizations. The 1956 breakout sessions, which were a longstanding feature of the MFRC’s annual meetings, featured seminars on civil rights, housing, churches, education, recreation, and Southern migrants.
In 1951, Dorothy N. Dolbey, a committee member since 1949, became the first woman to serve as chair of the MFRC, but her service ended after eight months when she resigned to become a Charter Committee candidate for city council. She would go on in the mid-1950s to serve as both vice-mayor and as acting mayor after the death of Mayor Edward Waldvogel. Dolbey was among several Cincinnatians who would use the MFRC and later the CHRC as a platform from which to launch a political career.
Meanwhile the three-person MFRC staff (Marshall Bragdon, Virginia Coffey, and Janet Smith) continued to address racial tensions in neighborhoods, parks, schools, and businesses from the twenty-by-twenty-foot confines of room 105 in City Hall. In this constricted space they met with various committee members, politicians, city administration officials, and citizens with complaints. Even after renovations increased the committee’s office space, the city budget did not allow for additional furniture, so Marshall Bragdon spent several weekends purchasing materials out of his own pocket and building desks for the staff.
Despite space and financial constraints, the MFRC quietly went about its business with the close cooperation of city council member Theodore M. Berry, who would go on to become the city’s first African American mayor. During the 1950s the MFRC adopted a two-pronged approach, working to improve human relations in both the governmental and the private sectors.
On the governmental front the committee successfully argued for integrating the swimming pools operated by the Recreation Commission and by the Cincinnati Public Schools. The MFRC defused the “problems” some feared would come with the hiring of the first black meter reader in the water department. In 1955 the city’s first black firefighter was hired after the committee pointed out that an ordinance forbidding “discrimination in the appointment, promotion and remuneration of city employees” had been on the books for nine years.
Police-community relations remained at the top of the committee’s governmental agenda throughout the decade. The police shooting of an unarmed black youth in Walnut Hills and the wounding of another citizen by a ricocheting bullet resulted in angry protests, but the city manager cleared the officers involved of any wrongdoing. According to Marshall Bragdon, “the MFRC’s report did not make a judgment on that; its emphasis was on the obvious need for better police-citizen interchange, in and between crises.” Some progress was made in this area when Stanley R. Schrotel, formerly of the Race Relations Detail, was named chief of police, and invited Bragdon to lecture each new recruit class for the following six years. In 1957, Chief Schrotel’s picture appeared on the front cover of Life magazine along with an article lauding his department as a “Model Police Force” for the nation.
An incident involving the arrest of women in the West End for disorderly conduct drew crowds of five hundred to a thousand people over a period of two days. Tensions abated after the MFRC helped set up a meeting among black and white stakeholders. But the committee, distracted by other issues, did not follow up on the potential for better police-community relations that resulted. In Bragdon’s words, “We did not build solidly for the long pull.”