The Cincinnati Human Relations Commission. Phillip J. Obermiller
“errant schoolboy” was fatally shot by two police officers after he attacked them with a crowbar. The NAACP took up his case but a grand jury and the police chief exonerated the officers. In 1958 fourteen-year-old Abe Savage Jr. was shot to death by police after joyriding in his father’s car and ignoring three roadblocks. Murder warrants filed by Abe Savage Sr. were dismissed, and the county prosecutor refused to take the case against the officers involved to a grand jury.
The MFRC undertook a study of these and several previous fatal shootings of black citizens by the police. The committee’s findings were made public in a report stating that (1) there was no evidence of racial discrimination on the part of the police; (2) police officers were generally exercising good judgment; and (3) police procedures, training, and supervision were adequate. Marshall Bragdon summed up the committee’s stance: “Evaluating the whole Abe Savage controversy, we have no doubt that it brought upon MFRC and its director sharp criticism and hostility from some quarters, and approbation from others . . . errors [were] made, but the community was somewhat better equipped to deal with the next contention.”
Work in the schools continued apace throughout the decade. Most notable was Assistant Director Virginia Coffey’s efforts to “raise the sights” of black students by recounting “Negro success stories.” She visited schools across the city on this mission, at the same time working with Assistant Superintendent Wendell Pierce to identify and encourage black teachers to seek promotion to administrative posts.
Coffey’s repertoire of success stories grew to include an X-ray technician, a city engineer, a beautician, a fireman, and an architect, to name a few. At Bloom Junior High students put on a play posing student actors as prospective dropouts encouraged to stay in school by other black students portraying adults who had stayed in school and “made it.” At the play’s end the real-life counterparts of the “successful adults” played by the students walked on stage and told their stories. In Bragdon’s words, “their presence and remarks were a hit, making ‘opportunity’ seem a bit more than a word.” Bolstering Coffey’s emphasis on the need to work with young people, in 1957 city council set up the Citizens’ Committee on Youth, a sister agency contracting with the city alongside the MFRC.
Bragdon summarized the MFRC’s passive role in governmental relations by noting that it functions “(1) as a consultant to government, in which role its advice is sought and participation welcomed in dealing with delicate, confidential matters; (2) as interpreter for disprivileged [sic] people needing a spokesman; (3) as a within-the-family critic, spotting errors, warning of consequences.”
In the private sector the MFRC’s objections to mounting minstrel shows at local high schools were heeded. Collaboration between the MFRC and the Cincinnati Committee on Human Relations, founded in the late 1940s, resulted in the acceptance of black students in both the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and the College of Music of Cincinnati (which would later coalesce into the University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music). A five-year “consultation” led by Virginia Coffey ended with the full integration of the local Girl Scout summer camping experience.
The MFRC was less successful, however, in urging the desegregation of Coney Island, an initiative complicated by the fact that only part of the 365-acre amusement park was within the city’s jurisdiction. Opening the park to black patrons came piecemeal throughout the decade, culminating in full desegregation in 1961, primarily through the efforts of the Urban League and the NAACP. Also unresolved was the MFRC’s objection to a union’s using racial prejudice to force a restaurant to unionize its employees by “sending its Negro members to eat there in sudden numbers,” thereby discouraging white patrons. The MFRC condemned this practice as a “cheap exploitation of racial prejudice,” but only evoked a sharp rebuke from the union’s attorney.
Another major endeavor of the MFRC during the 1950s was encouraging fair employment practices. Urged by city council member Berry, the MFRC joined a committee including the NAACP, the Urban League, the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Jewish Vocational Service, and the Ohio State Employment Service (OSES), to sponsor a study of the status of black participation in the workforce and black median incomes relative to those of whites. Using the 1950 census and other data sources, the research showed “median Negro family income in 1949 was 49% lower than the median white” and that “of job orders handled by OSES in a 10-week period, 76% specified ‘white only.’”
Based on this information and the fact that the state legislature had repeatedly failed to adopt a Fair Employment Practices (FEP) bill, the MFRC issued its own report calling for a city ordinance “forbidding the practice of discrimination in employment against persons solely because of race, color, religious creed, national origin or ancestry by employers, employment agencies, labor organizations, and others.” In 1953 the report was distributed citywide to citizens, pastors, and educators, as well as governmental and social service agency personnel.
This passive distribution of the fair employment report was unsatisfactory to some. Marian Spencer, a civil rights leader and early member of the MFRC, recalls,
I felt this was an excellent report and I lobbied strongly to have the report well publicized. I proposed a speaker’s bureau and public meetings to discuss the report. Mr. Bragdon, the chair [sic], told me, “You don’t know what we’re about at the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee.” I said, “Oh yes I do, but the committee isn’t doing it.” I resigned.
The city council took four years to bring the MFRC’s proposed ordinance to the floor, failing to pass it by a single vote. Three more years would go by until “in 1959 an Ohio Civil Rights Law was passed, much more effective than a city ordinance, which could not touch suburban discrimination.” Richard Guggenheim, a member of the MFRC’s board, was appointed chair of the new Ohio Civil Rights Commission. Bragdon credited the years of research and public education it took to get a statewide FEP law on the books with a modest “The whole effort was worth doing.”
The MFRC had more tangible results in convincing Cincinnati’s Civil Service Commission to delete the question “Are you white? Colored?” from its application forms. In cooperation with the Urban League, the NAACP, and the Jewish Community Relations Council, the MFRC convinced the Commission to record racial information after employment was secured, thus preventing a priori discrimination while allowing valuable data on employment opportunities for blacks to be collated and analyzed after the fact.
Ancillary to its efforts to promote fair employment practices was the committee’s unsuccessful involvement in open-housing issues throughout the 1950s. It fought blockbusting practices in Avondale, where, despite meetings with white residents and the distribution of Not for Sale signs, white flight continued unabated. When the developers of Forest Park came to city council to contract for its water supply, a member of the council suggested including an open-housing requirement in the contract. The MFRC saw it as a “harsh dilemma” but stood quietly by as council approved a contract without an open-housing stipulation. Eleven years would pass before the suburb became racially integrated. In Evanston, Montgomery Road was considered the dividing line between black (west side) and white (east side) housing. After a black family bought a home two blocks east of Montgomery Road tensions in the neighborhood rose. According to Bragdon, “despite MFRC’s and others’ efforts to ‘contage’ calmness, the turnover was swift and frictional.” The MFRC failed to convince the Kirby Road neighborhood to allow an integrated housing project proposed by the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority. Controversy over the project caused the CMHA to sell the tract to a private developer and the development remained all-white for the following ten years.
In keeping with its inclusive policy of improving understanding of all groups in the city, the committee turned its attention to the large numbers of white Southerners that began migrating to Cincinnati during and after the Second World War. In 1954 the MFRC sponsored a “Workshop on the Southern Mountaineer,” led by Dr. Roscoe Giffin from Berea College. The committee subsequently developed a fifty-page written report that went to four printings and was used nationwide as a template for understanding the migrants’ needs and concerns. A flurry of activity occurred in the ensuing years, including surveys of Appalachian migrants, sending representatives to the annual meetings of the Council of the Southern Mountains, and follow-up workshops