VOLUME 14 • NUMBER 3 • FALL 2014 Ohio Valley History Is a OHIO VALLEY STAFF Nikki M

A Collaboration of The Filson Historical Society, Cincinnati Museum Center, and the University of Cincinnati. VOLUME 14 • NUMBER 3 • FALL 2014 Ohio Valley History is a OHIO VALLEY STAFF Nikki M. Taylor Dr. Mitchel Livingston collaboration of The Filson Texas Southern University Phillip C. Long Editors Joe W. Trotter Jr. John Pepper Jr. Historical Society, Cincinnati William H. Bergmann Carnegie Mellon University Thomas H. Quinn Museum Center, and the Department of History Joanna Reeder Department of History, University Slippery Rock University CINCINNATI J. Scott Robertson of Cincinnati. Robert Gioielli MUSEUM CENTER Keith P. Spiller Department of History BOARD OF TRUSTEES Judith K. Stein, M.D. University of Cincinnati Steve Steinman Cincinnati Museum Center and

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A Journal of the History and Culture of the Ohio Valley and the Upper South, published in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky, by Cincinnati Museum Center and The Filson Historical Society. Contents

3 The Battle for Educational Freedom The 1949 Indiana “Fair Schools” Bill Monroe H. Little Jr.

26 A “Voice from the Gallery” Andrew Ramsey and School Desegregation in Indianapolis Modupe Labode

49 Investing in Segregation The Long Struggle for Racial Equity in the Cairo, Illinois, Public Schools Kathryn Anne Schumaker

68 Collection Essay Twentieth-Century African American Collections at The Filson Jennifer Cole

76 Collection Essay Annette and E. Lucy Braun Papers at the Cincinnati Museum Center Christine Engels

80 Review Essay Voices of the People Studies of Louisville Desegregation Dionne Danns

86 Book Reviews

97 Announcements

on the cover: Segregation at Riverside Park. COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY Contributors

Dionne Danns is associate professor in the department of educational leadership and policy studies at Indiana University. Her research focuses on the history of education, particularly African American education. She published Something Better for Our Children: Black Organizing in Chicago Public Schools, 1963-1971 in 2003. Her second book, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools: Policy Implementation, Politics, and Protest, 1965-1985, appeared in 2014.

Modupe Labode is an assistant professor of History and Museum Studies and public scholar of African American History and Museums at Indiana University- Purdue University Indianapolis. Before coming to IUPUI in 2007, she was the chief historian at the Colorado Historical Society.

Monroe H. Little Jr. is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. He is currently writing a biography of Indianapolis civil rights attorney Henry J. Richardson Jr.

Kathryn Anne Schumaker is an Assistant Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 2013. Her current book project is tentatively titled “Civil Rights at the Schoolhouse Gate: Student Protest and the Struggle for Racial Reform.”

2 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY The Battle for Educational Freedom The 1949 Indiana “Fair Schools” Bill

Monroe H. Little Jr.

oday, scholars widely acknowledge that the 1940s represents a neglected decade of the U.S. civil rights movement. Yet this historical period, part of what Jacquelyn Hall calls the long civil rights movement, remains Trich with stories of activists who contested the nation’s definition of freedom and struggled to expand its meaning and enjoyment by groups historically excluded from its full benefits. One such significant event, though frequently overlooked or only mentioned in passing by most historians, was the passage of Indiana’s 1949 “Fair Schools Bill.” The story of its eventual passage is important for twentieth century civil rights history. It extends the struggle for equality backward in time to the New Deal liberalism of the 1930s that accelerated during World War II’s increased impatience among African Americans nationally with the pace of racial reform and the emergence of the classical civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Central to this story are the efforts of Indianapolis African American civil rights activists such as Henry and Rosalyn Richardson, Willard Ransom, Jessie Jacobs, and Starling James as well as a federation of African American social clubs and the local African American press. Along with the NAACP, these activists and groups contested the existing definition of equal educational opportunity in Indiana and initiated a lengthy battle between 1934 and 1949 to pass the fair schools bill. Moreover, it serves as a case study of Doug McAdam’s political process model, which posits that successful social movements require a level of organization and assessment of their possible success within the oppressed group, as well as improved opportunities for reform within the larger political environment. An examination of the historical landscape of this case finds that the confluence of critical factors as identified by McAdam was present in Indiana and the Indianapolis African American community by the late 1940s that enabled it to push successfully for statewide legislation against racial segregation in public schooling by 1949. Consequently, the Indiana “Fair Schools” battle enhances our understanding of the late 1940s post-World War II struggle in Northern and Midwestern states to bring increased public attention to racial discrimination and build broad-based interracial community support for social reform.1

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Despite its identification as a northern free state, white supremacy and its offshoot, anti-black discrimination, has a long and ignoble history in Indiana. Before the Civil War, wrote historian Emma Lou Thornbrough, “the Black Code of Indiana had scarcely been equaled in its harshness by any other northern state.”2 African Americans suffered discrimination in housing, employment and schooling. State law prohibited interracial marriage and Indiana’s revised 1851 Constitution even barred African Americans from settling in the state— unless they posted a bond. Although some of Indiana’s worst anti-black laws were repealed after the Civil War, the state’s African American citizens continued to encounter racial segregation in public transportation and were denied access to public facilities such as hotels, theatres and restaurants. Some rural Indiana communities, known as “sundown towns,” prohibited African Americans from settling in them or even staying overnight.3 A similar situation existed in public education. Indiana’s 1877 School Law permitted, but did not mandate, racial segregation in the assignment of students, leaving the decision in the hands of local citizens and school officials. As a result, racial segregation in Indiana’s public schools was virtually non-existent in some counties and communities in central and northern Indiana, such as Indianapolis. In southern Indiana counties and many other cities in the state, however, separate schools were maintained.4 By the 1920s the situation with respect to race and public schooling took a turn for the worse. In both Indianapolis and Gary, Indiana—cities with the state’s largest African American populations—racial segregation in public education became official school board policy during that decade. Growth in the state’s African American population, as a result of the Great Migration, and the rise of the Indiana Klan after World War I, precipitated rising demands by white supremacists in both cities for increased racial segregation in their public schools. Racial segregationists advanced two chief arguments for such a policy. First, they claimed that the presence of black and white children in the same schools men- aced the health of the latter. Second, they argued that racial segregation would ultimately benefit African Americans by encouraging increased pride in their work, improved scholarship and greater self-initiative. In response to these white supremacist arguments, the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners mandated racially segregated elementary schools in that city during the early 1920s and required African American pupils to attend them. Later, between 1927 and 1932 racial segregation in Indiana schools extended to the secondary level when Indianapolis’s Crispus Attucks and Gary’s Friedrich Frobel were designated all- black high schools by those cities’ school boards.5 White supremacist victories in Indianapolis and Gary appeared to encourage segregationists in other Indiana communities as well. However, as before there was no clearly identifiable pattern or logic in this shift towards racially segregated schooling.

4 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MONROE H. LITTLE JR.

Crispus Attucks High School classroom. COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Some communities with relatively large African American populations, such as East Chicago and South Bend, never adopted an official policy of racial segregation, while smaller cities, such as Elkhart, with small numbers of African Americans instituted racial segregation in their schools for the first time in their history.6 By the 1930s letters from African American Hoosiers complaining about racial discrimination and segregation in public facilities, transportation and schools came regularly to the NAACP’s national office. Freeman Ransom, an African American lawyer and respected leader in the Indianapolis African American community, summed up the situation in a letter to the national NAACP, charg- ing that, “The Negro suffers every type and kind of discrimination in this state that he suffers anywhere, even Jim-Crow theatres and movie picture houses.” In Indianapolis, African American parents routinely registered complaints with the public schools’ superintendent about crowded, dilapidated and inferior facilities as well as unequal educational opportunities. When a group of white parents petitioned the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners to transfer twelve African American children from School 91 “to the nearest colored school,” which was already overcrowded, the Indianapolis Recorder’s editor denounced the parents’ request as “a sinister move of an element of citizens whose only aim is to stuff down the throats of decent taxpayers in this community a system of legal- ized segregation in the schools that is utterly opposite to the spirit of the constitution of the United States.”7 For African Americans in Indianapolis and other Indiana communities the only answer to their deteriorating situation appeared to be the passage of strong civil rights laws and their vigorous enforcement. Several factors began to

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1933 Indiana State Legislature. Henry Richardson Jr. is left of center, halfway up. COURTESY OF THE INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

coalesce in Indiana by the 1930s which, as McAdam posits, contributed to “a growing sense of political efficacy” within the state’s African American population as they “came to redefine existing conditions as subject to change through collective action” and challenge white supremacy in the state. This included the emergence of a consensus among African Americans in Indiana around ideas grounded in concepts of freedom, equality and opportunity promulgated by national civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and the National Urban League, through periodicals such as The Crisis and Opportunity. The NAACP, whose stated mission was “to secure for all people the rights guaranteed in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, which promised an end to slavery, the equal protection of the law, and universal adult male suffrage,” played a prominent role in developing and promoting an exe- gesis of the African American condition, as well as formulating an ideology of freedom centered on human and civil rights. Another factor was the emergence of newer, more aggressive local African American leaders in the state, who embraced this freedom ideology, disseminated its core ideas to the larger public, and were unhesitant in applying those same ideas to the African American struggle against racial segregation and discrimination in Indiana. Third, was the emergence of local organizations within Indiana’s African American community that

6 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MONROE H. LITTLE JR.

provided the financial resources and member-advocates that enabled Indiana’s African American community to subject Indianapolis public school officials and Indiana politicians to a full-court lobbying effort on behalf of civil rights in a manner previously unseen in state politics.8 To achieve social reform, African Americans also needed to mobilize sufficient political muscle to place pressure on local school officials and boards as well as the Indiana General Assembly. Prior to the direct action protests of the 1950s and 1960s, muscle of this sort meant representation in the traditional corridors of political power: state legislatures, city councils and other elected and appointed bodies. In the early twentieth century, however, African Americans were politically weak and underrepresented in Indiana politics. Since 1896, not a single African American had been nominated by either major political party as a candidate for the state legislature. Even Indiana Republicans failed to do so, despite African Americans’ traditional loyalty to the party of Lincoln. This situation began to change by the 1920s, however. First the Great Migration almost doubled Indiana’s African American population from 60,320 in 1910 to 114,283 by 1940, making them a presence in state politics as potential swing voters that neither Republicans nor Democrats could ignore. Second was a growing concern among African Americans about purported Ku Klux Klan influence in the

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state and the Republican Party, which generated a heightened interest in politics among African Americans in Indiana generally and Indianapolis in particular, which was, according to William Giffin, an interest “strongly motivated by the principle of equality before the law.”9 The increased politicization and party realignment of African Americans in Indiana, which began in the 1920s around issues of equality and opportunity, began to bear fruit in the 1930s in what McAdam identifies as an “expansion in political opportunities.” In 1932, both the Republican and Democratic parties nominated African American candidates for state office in an effort to court the state’s growing number of African American voters. When the election results were tallied, both Democratic candidates—Robert Stanton of Lake County and Henry J. Richardson Jr. of Marion County—won election to the lower house of the Indiana General Assembly. Of these two African American legislators, Richardson would play an important leadership role in the African American freedom struggle in Indiana and future passage of the “Fair Schools” bill.10 During his first term in the Indiana House, Richardson—backed by a large Democratic majority with strong labor representation—became a whirlwind of legislative activity. He lobbied to end racial segregation in Indiana University- Bloomington’s dormitories and joined with political allies’ efforts to remove the Indiana state constitution’s ban on African Americans in the National Guard. Richardson also sponsored “a measure that required every contract made by a state or municipal corporation for construction or repair of a public building or public works contain an agreement that there be no racial discrimination in hiring.” Emboldened by passage of this measure, he then proposed a bill to strengthen Indiana’s 1885 civil rights law, but it died in committee. A second attempt by Richardson in the 1935 session of the General Assembly to put teeth into Indiana’s 1885 civil rights law not only went down to defeat, but his outspo- kenness and perceived militancy on its behalf led to withdrawal of Democratic Party support for his re-election in 1936. After his failed attempt, no effort on behalf of civil rights legislation would occur in Indiana until after World War II.11 Richardson’s failure to achieve victory can be attributed in large part to the fact that Indiana legislators found little need to support his efforts to strengthen Indiana’s 1885 civil rights law at that time. During the 1930s the prevailing ideology of white supremacy, which characterized African Americans as different and therefore unequal, was largely unquestioned by most white Hoosiers. Consequently, the majority of Indiana politicians were under no pressure—either from their white constituents or the state’s dominant elite power groups—to support proposals for overthrowing the system of racial segregation. Only eliminating the most egregious examples of racial segregation, such as in the National Guard, or symbolic acts like supporting non-discrimination provisions in public works construction regulations that could not actually

8 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MONROE H. LITTLE JR. be enforced, received support. Although some change occurred in the 1930s political environment of the New Deal, no event or broad social process had occurred, which McAdam’s political process model mandates, to undermine the chief racial “calculations and assumptions on which the political establishment was structured” to occasion a major shift in the state’s political opportunities for African Americans. This situation was about to change though.12 World War II and revelations about racially inspired Nazi horrors intensified African Americans’ bitterness about racial discrimination in the United States, many of whom noted the inconsistency between the idealism of the nation’s war aims, and the reality of the racial segregation and violence they experienced on an almost daily basis. In addition, an active crusade for equality by the African American press, whose circulation grew from 1,265,000 to 1,809,000 during the war, “sought not to take its readers’ minds off their troubles, as one analyst pointedly put it, but precisely to keep their minds on them.” Three years before U.S. entry into the war, the Pittsburgh Courier cautioned its readers, “Before any of our people get unduly excited about SAVING DEMOCRACY in Europe, it should be called to our attention that we have NOT YET ACHIEVED DEMOCRACY HERE.” The Norfolk Journal and Guide was equally blunt in its appraisal of American aims. “We are on the spot,” it wrote in spring, 1942. “Our people cry out in anguish: This is no time to stick to a middle of the road policy; help us get some of the blessings of Democracy here at home first

Indianapolis Recorder offices. COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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before you jump on the free-the-other-peoples bandwagon.” A columnist in the Indianapolis Recorder, M. Beaunorus Tolson, wrote, “White America, you can’t fight Hitler successfully if your banners are labeled FOR WHITES ONLY. You have to put up Democracy—or shut up! A billion yellow men and brown men and black men are calling for a showdown.” As critical of racial oppression the African American press was, though, it was nowhere near that of its readership. “It would surprise and startle the majority of white Americans if they knew what the so-called mass of Negroes is thinking,” said E. Washington Rhodes, editor of the The Philadelphia Tribune. “The mass of Negroes is more radical than…those of us who publish Negro newspapers.”13 World War II therefore generated an increasingly militant mood among African Americans nationally and in Indiana. It strengthened their resolve to resist a return to the status quo after the war and unflinchingly and unapolo- getically demand their rights. African American veterans demanded fulfillment of the ideals of democracy and freedom they had fought for abroad, while their civilian counterparts were determined to hold onto and expand the economic gains they had made during the war. This more militant mood was also reflected in the growth of the NAACP nationally, whose successful lobbying and litigation on behalf of civil rights in the 1930s not only boosted its prestige among African Americans, but also increased membership nine-fold during the war. The NAACP’s Indianapolis branch and other branches in Indiana also experienced membership growth during the 1940s.14 Significantly, many members of the Indianapolis NAACP also belonged to a more formidable organization, by virtue of its broad-based community network of smaller social groups and sizeable membership—the Federation of Associated Clubs. Founded in 1937 by Starling James and his associates in nine local social clubs, by 1949 the FAC had grown to seven thousand members of approximately 175 affiliated social and community clubs. Its monthly magazine, the Federation News, not only reported news about member clubs, but published editorials by James as well as Henry Richardson on various social issues, repeatedly enjoining its members to “fight for the economic, civil, and social liberties of our people.”15 World War II and the immediate post-war years therefore presented civil rights activists with a landscape uniquely fertile for civil rights reform. By this time at least two of McAdam’s three sets of factors to initiate a successful political insurgency against racial segregation were present in Indiana. Inspired by wartime ideological appeals to democracy as well as the African American presses’ “Double V” propaganda campaign that heightened their own sense of injustice, Indiana’s African Americans renewed their push to eliminate racial discrimination after the war. They also possessed a higher level of indigenous organization than ever before, as exemplified by active NAACP branches and the FAC. Moreover, African American owned newspapers, such

10 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MONROE H. LITTLE JR.

African American Service Men’s Club during World War II. COURTESY OF THE INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY as the Indianapolis Recorder—then at the apogee of its power and influence— played a prominent role in that process. Front page stories with bold headlines documenting continuing barriers to democracy, racial equality and opportunity in the state such as “NAACP HITS IU HOUSING SETUP,” “GARY SHOCKED BY SCHOOL STRIKE—Students’ Walkout Mixed in Race Hate,” “CIVIC GROUPS TO WAGE KKK FIGHT,” “OVERCROWDED SCHOOL BUSES PROTESTED BY ATTUCKS PUPILS” were reported by the Recorder between 1945 and 1946. Given this atmosphere, it is not surpris- ing that renewed calls by African Americans to end school segregation in the state occurred in May, 1945 when the chairman of the Indianapolis NAACP sought written clarification from the city’s Board of School Commissioners about its policy on racial segregation and to determine whether a change in the policy was anticipated. The response by the Indianapolis Public Schools’ superintendent and the Board of School Commissioners to both of these questions was evasive, however.16 There was nothing evasive about the board’s response to a request the following year by African American veterans who wanted to enroll in vocational courses only offered at all-white Arsenal Technical High School, however. The board “bluntly denied their request.” An appeal by the Veterans’ Administration on their behalf evoked a desultory statement that the Board of School Commissioners “did not intend to deviate from its established policy of racial segregation.”17

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Indianapolis Recorder “Victory Progress” Edition. July 7, 1945. COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

In December 1946, a broad based interracial coalition of local civic leaders, encouraged by successful efforts in Gary to desegregate schools there, and no doubt angered by the board’s rejection of the veterans’ request to attend Arsenal, presented a resolution to the Indianapolis commissioners demanding an end to Jim Crow schools in the city. Hailed as “a breath of fresh air” in the “smoggy educational atmosphere of Indianapolis” by one Recorder reporter, the resolution combined demands for African American and veterans’ rights, calling on the Board to set a date for the end of school segregation in the city, protect the rights of African American teachers and administrators during the process of school desegregation and “open all city high schools immediately for vocational training for all veterans regardless of race, creed or color.” After a brief hearing, the commissioners rejected the resolution. Undeterred, African American veterans, with the help of local civil rights allies, continued the fight.18 By 1947 Indiana’s white supremacists were under mounting pressure to end segregation in Indianapolis and throughout the state. In January of that year Henry and Rosalyn Richardson and Harry and Margaret Taylor, having moved recently into a previously all-white neighborhood north of 38th street, attempted to enroll their children in Indianapolis Public School No. 43. Assistant Superintendent W.A. Hacker, who was in charge of pupil assignment, repeatedly denied these attempts, despite the fact that School No. 43 was in their neighborhood. Hacker’s rejection prompted Richardson to write a personal letter to NAACP legal counsel Thurgood Marshall “for the purpose of solicit- ing your immediate interest, aid and cooperation in the direction of abolishing

12 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MONROE H. LITTLE JR. our segregated school system here.” Shortly after, Representatives William L. Fortune and Wilbur H. Grant introduced House Bill 406, the fair schools bill, in the state legislature. Bill 406 was drawn up “largely by the Race Relations Committee of the Church Federation of Indianapolis and followed closely on the heels of an ‘Anti-Hate’ Bill proposed by state senators John Van Ness and Robert Brokenburr in January 1947,” It called for the state “to provide equal educational opportunities and facilities for all”; forbade school officials from maintaining or continuing “separate schools”; banned enrollment “on the basis of race” in existing segregated schools; Osma Spurlock (1917-2007). COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER and prohibited any “tax-supported school, college or COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY university” from discriminating “in any way against students on the basis of race, creed or color.” The Indiana Pastors’ Conference, as well as a broad array of local civic groups ranging, from the NAACP and the Veterans Civil Rights Committee to the City Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs and African American fraternities and sororities, immediately rallied behind the bill. In addition, local civil rights activists pressed the Citizens School Committee to include African American and progressive white candidates on its slate for upcoming Indianapolis School Board elections. Unfortunately, as before, both efforts to alter the racial status quo in state and local public education were unsuccessful. The bill died in committee and the Citizens School Committee refused to expand its slate of school board candidates.19 Undaunted, the local coalition of civil rights leaders and organizations, which formed around Bill 406, continued to press for school desegregation. Following the adjournment of the Indiana legislature in spring 1947, they mounted a public campaign to influence community opinion on the issue of Jim Crow schools. Speakers at community functions ranging from social service workers’ gather- ings and YMCA Sunday forums to church, lodge and bridge club luncheons stated their concerns about and condemned the deprivation and injustice that racial segregation inflicted upon African Americans and other minority groups. Rosalyn Richardson, Jessie Jacobs, Nan White, Furney King, and Osma Spurlock organized NAACP affiliated grass-roots neighborhood working groups of north side Indianapolis parents into twelve geographical districts to discuss problems related to the board’s segregation policy. The women created maps of IPS’s school districts, which visually scored the differences between geographical ver- sus racially segregated school districts, along with conditions affecting children’s health and general welfare. These meetings, which included attorneys Richardson and Patrick Chavis, were held in individual homes every two weeks.20

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During this same period, the newly formed neighborhood groups presented several petitions to the Board of School Commissioners during the remainder of 1947 and early 1948 to improve conditions in the city’s schools. In October 1948 Richardson, representing the newly created Northside Parents Association and the NAACP, of which he was the state legal representative, appeared before the Board to present yet another petition for this same purpose. The board had blocked previous petitions by parents with the disengenuous claim that they needed more time to study and investigate their requests. This time was different, though. Richardson gave the board an ultimatum: it had thirty days to respond to the Northside Parents’ Association’s latest petition, either with further discussion or a final decision. He bolstered his demand for board action with a threat: if it failed to do so, the association would seek legal redress in the courts. A month later, Richardson appeared before the board again, which had still taken no action, and presented them with a “Blueprint for Integration of the Races in the Public Schools of Indianapolis.” Richardson’s blueprint called for the enrollment of all pupils entering kindergarten, first grade, junior high school, and high school by the fall of 1949, without distinction based on race or religion. In subsequent years, all other students entering these grades would be able to enroll in the school of their geographical district without regard to race or religion.21 By 1948, local and state civil rights activists in Indiana had powerful socio- logical support for their struggle as well as international pressure for improved race relations. The publication of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma in 1944, a comprehensive and wide ranging study of the African American condition and interracial relations, crystallized national awareness that racial discrimination and legal segregation could not endure in the United States. Myrdal argued that a so-called “American Creed,” which emphasized the ideals of liberty, equality, justice, and fair treatment of all people, shaped political and social inter- action in the United States. This creed not only kept the diverse U.S. melting pot together, Myrdal argued, but it was the common belief in the creed that also gave all Americans—white, black, rich, poor, male, female, and foreign immigrants alike—a common cause which allowed them to co-exist as one nation. Three years after Myrdal’s study appeared, the Committee on Civil Rights, established by President Harry S. Truman, issued its final report “To Secure These Rights,” which added official government support to Myrdal’s extensive research as well as national policy recommendations. The committee’s report, which became a blueprint for the modern civil rights movement, identified remarkable disparities in the racial treatment of African Americans in both the North and the South. It called for a series of measures, such as federal protection of black voting rights, enforcement of anti-lynching laws, an end to segregation in schools, housing and public accommodations, to improve race relations in the United States. Finally, the developing Cold War, which pitted the United States against

14 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MONROE H. LITTLE JR.

1949 Indiana School Desegregation Bill. INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

the Soviet Union, placed increasing pressure on the federal government to get the nation’s racial house in order to win allies among emerging independent non- white nations in Africa and Asia. Southerners met the federal government’s report and Myrdal’s study with defiance, and often used anti-communist attitudes generated by the cold war to oppose racial reform. Nevertheless, both efforts illumi- nated a real problem and called national attention to race relations in the United States. Civil rights reform now received a degree of favorable publicity that it had been denied in previous decades. As a result, African Americans’ struggle for freedom in Indiana was no longer a local or state issue, but assumed national and even international significance.22

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At the local and state level, school desegregation advocates received powerful support from one of the most widely read newspapers in Indiana, the Indianapolis Star. In a September 1948 editorial, its conservative editor and publisher Eugene Pulliam took an unequivocal stand against racial segregation in the city’s public schools. Calling for action Pulliam wrote: “Certainly the school commissioners have sense enough to know that that there is no legal basis for school segregation…. A policy of segregated schools was brought into existence during the Klan era, an era that still leaves a stain upon our reputation for fairness and justice. Previously mixed schools operated here without incident throughout the city. Most reasonable white persons in this city know that the mixing of races in our schools is the just and economical way to run the school system.” Pulliam’s editorial was both surpris- ing and unexpected, coming as it did from a person and a newspaper that usually supported the status-quo in race relations. Civil rights reformers showcased the Star’s editorial, penned by one of the most powerful leaders of the white political establishment, as proof that the time for change had come.23 Thus by 1949 the third of McAdam’s factors—a political realignment of groups within the larger political environment—had begun to take place, along with a heightened African American awareness of potential success and greater level of indigenous organization. This set the stage for a renewed push by civil rights advocates to topple segregation in Indiana public education. Local and state NAACP chapters joined with other progressive groups statewide and pushed for legislation to outlaw racial segregation in Indiana’s public schools. Legislators drafted a “Democracy-in-Schools Bill,” patterned after Richardson’s blueprint, for consideration at the 1949 session of the Indiana General Assembly. Although the proposed legislation made some concessions about the pace of desegregation in communities where it might impose a hardship on facilities, buildings or equipment, it required the end of racial segregation in all Indiana public schools, colleges and universities by 1954. The proposed bill also contained provisions guaranteeing and safeguarding the rights, tenure and appointments of teachers irre- spective of race, color or creed.24 First introduced in January 1949, House Bill 242 or the “Fair Schools” bill was sponsored by Representatives James S. Hunter of Lake County and a white Democrat, George Binder of Marion County. Riding a wave of reformist zeal at the national, local and state level, it appeared that the bill would sail smoothly through the state legislature. Indiana Governor Henry F. Schricker even gave it an indirect endorsement in his 1949 state-of-the-state address where he called upon legislators Indiana Governor Henry F. Schricker (1883-1966). “to work unceasingly to eliminate all racial discrimination in COURTESY OF THE INDIANA 25 our tax-supported educational institutions.” HISTORICAL SOCIETY

16 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MONROE H. LITTLE JR.

Although House Bill 242 eventually became law, its passage faced strong opposition from anti-civil rights forces at every step of the legislative process. After a first reading, the bill was referred to the House Committee on Education, where semi-public hearings on it were held. Departing from customary procedure, however, the committee invited supporters and opponents to appear sequentially, rather than simultaneously, which provided opponents with the time to organize their forces to defeat the bill. During the hearings, Representatives Hunter and Binder—House Bill 242’s sponsors—received threatening letters and phone calls. Both they and other legislators were swamped with vicious, allegedly Ku Klux Klan inspired, white supremacist literature. The “race-hatred material” which, according to Richardson, “was almost verbatim” to that used to defeat his proposed 1935 civil rights legislation in the General Assembly, urged legislators to impose racial segregation “in every city to be inhabited by Negroes, with separate schools, police force, stores, etc.” Despite these efforts to defeat or weaken the bill, the Indiana House passed it by a vote of 58 to 21.26 When House Bill 242 arrived in the Indiana Senate, the legislative battle was renewed. Initially, it could not find a sponsor. This was attributable, in part, to the party composition of the senate at that time which, unlike the Democratic controlled house, had a Republican majority. Few senate Republicans were inclined to support a civil rights bill in 1949 given the party’s legacy of Ku Klux Klan dominance in the 1920s and, according to at least one state political leader, its continued influence afterwards. Other Republicans saw little, if any, political benefit for them to support legislation aimed at advancing the civil rights of African Americans, a constituency which had not voted Republican in large numbers since the New Deal political realignment of the 1930s. Consequently, House Bill 242 languished in the Senate Education Committee until two state Senators, Leo J. Stemle and William A. Butcher, a Democrat and Republican respectively, were persuaded to co-sponsor it, after several days of political arm-twisting.27 Stemle and Butcher’s first task was getting the bill reported out of the Senate Education Committee, where it had been bottled up for a week by opponents who openly boasted that it would “be chloroformed.” In the midst of an intense lobbying effort to pass the bill by parents’ associations, the local NAACP and the FAC, House Bill 242 received welcome support from yet another member of the state’s political elite, Governor Schricker, who publicly voiced his support for the bill. The governor’s action, no doubt influenced by the Democrat’s 1948 victory nationally and in Indiana that was attributed to heavy African American turnout on behalf of a president and state party that endorsed civil rights reform, “handed a hot potato to the Republicans and they refused to hold it,” political observers claimed. Facing growing, unfavorable public exposure as the party opposed to “ending second-class education” for African Americans, the Republican controlled Senate, in what the Recorder called “a surprise move,” reported the bill

FALL 2014 17 THE BATTLE FOR EDUCATIONAL FREEDOM

favorably out of its Education Committee. Although this legislative concession was an important step towards eventual victory, NAACP leaders cautioned that House Bill 242 was still by no means assured of passage during the logjam of legislation that would develop before the legislature’s adjournment March 7. “Negroes and fair-minded whites, therefore, were urged to keep the pressure on their legislators until the bill is safely through the General Assembly.”28 The cautionary advice was more than justified. With just days left before adjournment, strong opposition to the bill surfaced prior to its second reading in the Senate. Legislative opponents added more than a dozen amendments to the bill in an attempt to eviscerate its effectiveness. Outside opposition also came from white Indianapolis community organizations, such as the Fairview and the North Indianapolis Civic Leagues, whom NAACP state president Willard Ransom accused of “spearheading a drive to defeat the measure by delaying tac- tics.” This, according to Richardson, proved the low point of civil rights advocates’ hopes of seeing House Bill 242 become law.29 Not to be outdone, civil rights activists rallied their own forces. They called upon every local or state organization and individual even remotely connected to House Bill 242 to lobby members of the Indiana Senate. It was at this stage of the struggle that the high level of organization within the aggrieved population, called for in McAdam’s political process model, benefitted civil rights reformers. Religious and social organizations raised money for telegrams and emergency trips by lobbyists to the General Assembly. African American sororities and fraternities sent petitions and letters. Women’s clubs postponed their regular meetings to lobby state legislators on behalf of House Bill 242 in the corridors of the state capitol. The ministers of African American churches not only allowed announcements about the proposed legislation to be read from their pulpits, but also encouraged members to sign petitions and visit the legislature on its behalf. An impressive list of civic groups such as the Church Federation of Indianapolis, Federation of Associated Clubs, Interracial Committee of the YWCA, American Council on Human and Civil Rights, and NAACP, voiced their strong support for the proposed measure. Among these groups, the Community Relations Council “urged the Senators to ‘right a terrible wrong committed against a large segment of our population. Only if our children are taught to respect the equal rights of all their neighbors, can they as adults carry out our democratic way of life under our American system,’” the Council declared.30 Not to be outdone by the bill’s opponents Richardson, with only four days left in the legislative session, conferred most of the night with Governor Schricker and members of his strategy committee. Of particular concern were two amendments to the bill by Senator John J. Norris of Noblesville. The first and most crip- pling of the amendments “exempted Indianapolis, Gary, Evansville, and other large Indiana cities from the bills’ provisions, turning the matter over to the City

18 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MONROE H. LITTLE JR.

Councils in those localities.” This exemption would have destroyed the intent of the law in the principal cities where school segregation existed. The second amendment permitted local school boards to assign teachers to schools based on the racial majority of students in their classrooms. “While having little practical effect, in the estimation of theRecorder , “this amendment would have smeared the bill with the doctrine of racialism.” Efforts by the bill’s supporters to put senators on record by forcing a roll-call vote were rebuffed by Democratic Lieutenant Governor John A. Watkins, making them suspect that a “bi-partisan fix was on” to defeat the legislation. Supporters had to find another way to remove both amendments from the bill before passage in the Senate.31 That other way soon emerged, under the leadership of Richardson as well as the hard work of state and Indianapolis NAACP officials Willard Ransom and Jessie Jacobs. A telegram from the “[District] 31 Club,” comprised of thirty-five African American Republican precinct committeemen, was sent to senate Republicans demanding action. Signed by club president Jerry Groves, the message implored fellow Republicans to pass the bill. “Do not alienate loyal Negro Republicans by adverse vote on House Bill 242,” it said. “Our job to increase Negro support of GOP difficult enough now. Should be obvious that our party must support some fair and forward-looking legislation.” It concluded with the reminder, “More than 200,000 Negro citizens in state, including 70,000 in Marion County, have eyes on your vote on House Bill 242.” Prominent local African American Republican leaders, including Robert L. Brokenburr, Wilbur H. Grant, Rufus C. Kuykendall, and Frank L. Beckwith, joined with Democratic supporters of the bill to push

Willard Ransom, center, and Robert E. Brokenburr, second from right. COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

FALL 2014 19 THE BATTLE FOR EDUCATIONAL FREEDOM

for its passage. Never before in the state’s history, according to observers, had African American political leaders of both parties displayed so much unity on a specific piece of legislation. This bipartisan lobbying on the bill’s behalf had its intended effect. Confronted with such unprecedented support by Democrats, African American Republicans and the public, senate Republican opposition to the bill weakened. The crowning blow to their opposition came in a meeting of the GOP Senate Caucus when Republican State Chairman H. Clark Springer told them that their opposition to the bill portended political disaster for their party. They must not only recall House Bill 242 to the Senate floor, he said, but also send it past a second reading in its original form.32 Strongly chastised by their chairman, Republican senators rethought their original opposition to the measure. On March 2nd the Indiana Senate recalled House Bill 242 where an amendment to strike every previous amendment was submitted and passed 37 to 8, which restored the bill to its original form. The following day, House Bill 242, the Indiana “Fair Schools” Bill as it was now known, passed on its third and final reading with a vote of 31 to 10, with 8 abstentions. The legislation was submitted to Governor Schricker, who signed it into law the evening of March 8, 1949, using a pen presented to State Representative James Hunter by the late African American scientist, George Washington Carver. The new law provided for the completion of integration of pupils of both races in Indiana’s public schools by 1954. Beyond that year, state funds would be cut off for any school system that continued to practice racial segregation or that discriminated on the basis of color in the hiring, promotion or tenure of teachers. After seventeen years of struggle, Indiana’s civil rights activists had finally passed a significant piece of state civil rights legislation.33 The African American community greeted the passage of Bill 242 with jubi- lation. In recognition of their hard fought victory, the community called for a meeting at the Senate Avenue YMCA to celebrate its passage. “Enactment of the Hunter-Binder measure abolishing segregated schools is without doubt one of the high points of Indiana’s entire history,” the Indianapolis Recorder editorialized. “Weighing our words carefully, we assert that this is the greatest forward stride in democracy made in the Hoosier state since the Civil War.” It predicted that, “Effects of this New Emancipation on a state scale will be both immediate and enduring.” A letter to the NAACP National Office by Willard Ransom informed them that the new law “marked for the first time, a real death blow at segregation in Indiana, together with unification of all groups interested in civil rights working for the passage of this legislation.” Recorder columnist Andrew Ramsey waxed ecstatic about the “manner in which Negro organizations, churches and individuals rallied behind the effort” which led to the bill’s passage, seeing it as an indication of a degree of unity” among African Americans “never before believed possible.”34

20 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MONROE H. LITTLE JR.

Reverend Ford Gibson presents NAACP lifetime achievement award to Henry Richardson Jr. COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Like all post-World War II civil right legislation, however, Bill 242 proved more reformist than revolutionary in its impact. The immediate effect of the bill, by Richardson’s own admission, was “to create a change in thought habits rather than to revolutionize any school system.” A 1954 study by Dwight Culver found that while “some smaller Indiana communities have completely eliminated segregation in their schools, and all of the others have achieved at least a partial desegregation” it was still “possible to retain…a substantial segregation beyond that which merely reflects the patterns of residential segregation.” This was especially true in larger Indiana cities such as Indianapolis, Terre Haute and Evansville, where school segregation persisted even after passage of House Bill 242 “by pro- cedures which defy the intent, if not the letter, of the law.”35 Despite its limited impact, the history of House Bill 242 is important to scholars of the civil rights movement for two reasons. First, the political battle for its passage confirms the importance of the 1940s to understanding the history of the civil rights movement. It was during those years that the framework that would shape the struggle for civil rights in the United States emerged: the conviction that racial inequality was primarily a moral and psychological problem as well as the idea that fostering tolerance and promoting diversity would purge whites of their racial prejudice and free African Americans from feelings of inferiority. Such notions of the causes of and solutions to the nation’s racial conundrum would remain influential into the 1950s and beyond. The struggle to desegregate the state’s public schools in the 1940s therefore assists scholars in getting beyond the traditional story of the civil rights movement. It informs us that the African American press and an array of African American secular organizations played a key role in the movement, not just the African American church and the NAACP. It alerts us to a story not only national or southern in its importance, but also northern and Midwestern.36

FALL 2014 21 THE BATTLE FOR EDUCATIONAL FREEDOM

Second, it confirms the validity of McAdams’s political process model. Although the model focuses primarily on the origins of the classic civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the preceding pages demonstrate its appli- cability to earlier stages of the long civil rights struggle. Indeed, by 1949 the Indianapolis African American community had achieved a degree of organizational readiness that activists utilized effectively in their fight against school segregation. This readiness not only included a statewide NAACP organization and local chapters with a burgeoning membership, but a large federation of Indianapolis African American social clubs and other indigenous community groups as well. These organizations, as well as the African American press, made effective use of U.S. war aims to defeat Nazism and fascism abroad by linking them to the African American fight for freedom at home during the war years. This confluence of social and political factors altered the structure of Indiana’s political establishment, resulting in an expanded window of opportunity for reform by African Americans and their civil rights allies. The gift of hindsight enables us to see that Bill 242 did not become the magic bullet envisioned by civil rights leaders and organizations of the last century. It could not, given the complex, multi-layered nature of white supremacy embed- ded in twentieth century American society and culture. In fact, the struggle for freedom by African Americans in Indianapolis and the nation would continue into the 1950s and beyond. But passage of Bill 242, which placed Indiana’s stamp of approval on the ideals embodied in Myrdal’s American Creed, as well as state support for racial integration in Indiana’s schools, was an important step in African Americans’ mid-twentieth century political efforts to compel both government and society to take legislative action on the issue of civil rights for African Americans after decades of neglect. It was one small piece of an emerging reform effort that boosted the confidence of African Americans generally and civil rights activists in particular, to pursue their goal of destroying other barriers to equal opportunity in both Indiana and the nation as a whole in the future. In the words of the Indianapolis Recorder:

And how has the historic school victory been achieved?… Here let us note that the words of Frederick Douglass, “He who would be free must himself strike the first blow,” ring true again. Essentially, the struggle was won by the solidly united efforts of Indiana Negroes of every party but of one mind. Truly “every voice was raised”… and the minority group standing together aroused the conscience of the majority…. The camp of race prejudice was iso- lated and thrown into confusion and the new spirit of freedom that is rising everywhere carried the day.

22 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MONROE H. LITTLE JR.

Indiana and Indianapolis civil rights activists had indeed carried the day—if only for a moment. Their vision, their dream of a culture of interracial harmony and community, rather than the prevailing divisive culture of white supremacy, would be embraced by civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s as one very much worth the fight. 37

1 Since Richard Dalfiume’s seminal 1968 article, scholarly 3 Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana before interest in the 1940s and its importance to the civil rights 1900: A Study of a Minority (Indianapolis: Indiana movement has grown. See Richard M. Dalfiume, “The Historical Bureau, 1957), 92-150; Leon Litwack, North ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution,” Journal of of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 American History 55 (June 1968), 90-106; Jacquelyn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 67-72; Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and Eugene H. Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery: the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension History 91 (March 2005), 1233-1263: Carol Anderson, Controversy (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African 1967), 7-59, 123-37; Emma Lou Thornbrough, Since American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (New Emancipation: A Short History of Indiana Negroes, 1863- York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Megan 1963 (Indianapolis: Indiana Division American Negro Taylor Shockley, We, Too, Are Americans: African Emancipation Centennial Authority, 1963), 14-19; James American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940-1954 W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Barbara American Racism (New York: Touchstone Books, 2006), Dianne Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War and 65, 67, 210, 466-67. the Politics of Race, 1938-1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Danielle L. McGuire, 4 Thornbrough,The Negro in Indiana Before 1900, 320-44; At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Thornbrough, Since Emancipation, 25. Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to Black Power (New York: Vintage, 5 Thornbrough, “Segregation in Indiana,” 602, 603, 607- 2011). According to McAdam, there are three sets of 608. Gary’s decision to segregate its high schools led to essential factors necessary for the success of any social the appropriation of six hundred thousand dollars by city movement. First, there must be a sufficient “level of officials for the construction of a second all-black high organization within the aggrieved population.” Second, school, Roosevelt High School. there must be a “collective assessment of the prospects for 6 Robin M. Williams Jr., and Margaret W. Ryan, Schools successful insurgency within that same population.” The in Transition: Community Experiences in Desegregation third and final group of factors is “the political alignment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), of groups within the larger political environment.” The 68-69, 118. first of these sets of factors “can be conceived, as the degree of organizational ‘readiness’ within the minority 7 “Freeman Ransom to William Pickens,” Mar. 10, 1933, community; the second, as the level of ‘insurgent con- NAACP Papers, Library of Congress; “Want Colored sciousness’ or ‘cognitive liberation’ within the movement’s Students Barred,” Indianapolis Recorder, Feb. 16, 1935; mass base that enables them to define their situation as “Racial Intolerance,” Indianapolis Recorder, Feb. 23, 1935. unjust and subject to change through collective action; and the third is the structure of political opportunities 8 “NAACP: 100 Years of History.” http://www.naacp. available within the broader political system for the org/pages/naacp-history. Accessed 10/14/14; McAdam, oppressed population to initiate change.” See Doug Political Process, 230. McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago 9 U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, U.S. Press, 1982), 40. Census, 1910; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census, 1940; William W. Giffin, “The 2 Emma Lou Thornbrough, “Segregation in Indiana during Political Realignment of Black Voters in Indianapolis, the Klan Era of the 1920s,” Mississippi Valley Historical 1924,” Indiana Magazine of History 79 (June 1983), 134. Review 47 (Mar. 1961), 596.

FALL 2014 23 THE BATTLE FOR EDUCATIONAL FREEDOM

10 “Race Gets Richardson and Stanton in Legislature,” 18 “Vets Plan New Campaign Against JimCrowism in Indianapolis Recorder, Nov. 12, 1932; Emma Lou Schools of City,” Indianapolis Recorder, Jan. 11, 1947. Thornbrough,Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 80, 89-91. 19 Henry J. Richardson Jr. to Thurgood Marshall, Jan. 30, 1947, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress; 11 Thornbrough,Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, 91; Indiana Laws (1933), pp. 122-28; Indiana, House 144-45; “Fortune-Grant Bill: End Separate Schools, Ind. Journal (1933), pp. 588, 711; “Civil Rights Bill Fails,” Assembly Asked,” Indianapolis Recorder, Feb. 15, 1947; Indianapolis Recorder, Feb. 2, 1935. “Jim Crow Schools Dealt Blow by Clerics,” Indianapolis Recorder, Feb. 15, 1947; “Two Proposed for School 12 McAdam, Political Process, 41. Board,” Indianapolis Recorder, June 28, 1947.

13 John H. Burma, “An Analysis of the Present Negro Press,” 20 Richardson and Baumgartel, “The History of the 1949 Social Forces 26 (Oct. 1947), 173; Gene Roberts and Hank Indiana School Desegregation Law,” Henry J. Richardson Klibanoff,The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, Papers, Indiana Historical Society, 2-3; “Local NAACP,” and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Random House, Indianapolis Recorder, Dec. 6, 1947. 2006), 15; “Democracy at Home,” Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 23, 1939; M. Beaunorus Tolson, “Caviar and Cabbage: 21 Richardson and Baumgartel, “The History of the 1949 White Pilates, Judases and Hitlers in Nat’l Defense Taken Indiana School Desegregation Law,” Henry J. Richardson to Task,” Indianapolis Recorder, Jan. 25, 1941; Lee Finkle, Papers, Indiana Historical Society, 3; “Blueprint for Forum for Protest: The Black Press During World War II Integration of the Races in the Public Schools of (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Indianapolis,” Henry J. Richardson Papers, Indiana 1975), 64 (citing Norfolk Journal and Guide, Apr. 25, 1942, Historical Society; “Fight Sustained on Jim Crow Schools,” and quotation in Council for Democracy, “Negro Press Indianapolis Recorder, May 15, 1948; Thornbrough, Conference,” May 7-8, 1943). Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, 145.

14 “NAACP Drive Nets 1,200 New Members Here,” 22 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Indianapolis Recorder, Apr. 9, 1949. The same year the Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & National Office of the NAACP claimed a membership of Brothers, 1944); President’s Committee on Civil Rights, nearly half a million in 1,551 branches in forty-five states, To Secure These Rights (Washington: U.S. Government Washington, DC, and Hawaii. See, “5 New Members Printing Office, 1948); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Make National Board of NAACP,” Indianapolis Recorder, Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy Jan. 15, 1949. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011). See also, Obie Clayton Jr., ed., An American Dilemma 15 Federation News, July, 1941, cited in Dallas Daniels, Revisited: Race Relations in a Changing World (New York: “History of the Federation of Associated Clubs,” Russell Sage Foundation, 1996). 18; “FAC Meet Addressed by Governor Schriker,” Indianapolis Recorder, Jan. 15, 1949. Affiliates of the FAC 23 “Why Segregate Our Schools?” Indianapolis Star, included bridge, music, fraternities and sororities as well Sept. 26, 1948. as men’s and women’s clubs, labor organizations and even an American Legion post. 24 “Legislature to Get State NAACP Bill Banning Jim Crow in Indiana Public Schools,” Indianapolis Recorder, Jan. 8, 16 “NAACP Hits IU Housing Setup,” Indianapolis Recorder, 1949. According to the Recorder’s story, the state NAACP Oct. 6, 1945;”Gary Shocked by School Strike: Students’ also drafted a second bill to strengthen the Indiana civil Walkout Mixed in Race Hate,” Indianapolis Recorder, rights law. Sept. 29, 1945; “Civic Groups to Wage KKK Fight,” Indianapolis Recorder, Nov. 16, 1946; “Overcrowded 25 Thornbrough,Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, School Buses Protested by Attucks Pupils,” Indianapolis 146; “Schricker’s Speech to Legislature Lauded,” Recorder, Oct. 19, 1946; “Educational Committee Report Indianapolis Recorder, Jan. 15, 1949. of the Indianapolis Branch to the Branch Secretary of the Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century National Office,” Oct. 8, 1947, NAACP Papers, Library 26 Thornbrough, , of Congress. 146; Richardson and Baumgartel, “The History of the 1949 Indiana School Desegregation Law,” Henry J. 17 Henry J. Richardson and Howard J. Baumgartel, “The Richardson Papers, p. 4; “Klan Spirit Opposes Civil History of the 1949 Indiana School Desegregation Law,” Rights laws,” Indianapolis Recorder, Jan. 15, 1949. Henry J. Richardson Papers, Indiana Historical Society, 1-2; Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, 144; “City Jim Crow Schools Face New Challenge,” Indianapolis Recorder, Dec. 14, 1946.

24 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MONROE H. LITTLE JR.

27 Thornbrough,Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth 35 Richardson and Baumgartel, “The History of the 1949 Century, 146; “KKK Activity Charged in Indiana,” Indiana School Desegregation Law,” Henry J. Richardson Indianapolis Recorder, November 6, 1948; Richardson Papers, Indiana Historical Society, 7; Dwight W. Culver, and Baumgartel, “The History of the Indiana School “Racial Desegregation in Education in Indiana,” Journal Desegregation Law,” Henry J. Richardson Papers, Indiana of Negro Education 23 (Summer 1954), 297. Historical Society, 4. 36 Roberts and Klibanoff , The Race Beat, 61-394; Denton 28 “Truman, Civil Rights Triumph.” Indianapolis Recorder, L. Watson, Lion in the Lobby: Clarence Mitchell Jr.’s November 6, 1948; “Indiana Legislature Passes Bill to Struggle for the Passage of Civil Rights Laws (New York: Outlaw Segregated Schools,” Indianapolis Recorder, William Morrow and Co., 1990), 267-705. Mar. 5, 1949. 37 “Education Emancipated,” Indianapolis Recorder, Mar. 29 “Indiana Legislature Passes Bill to Outlaw Segregated 12, 1949. Twenty years after passage of House Bill 242 Schools,” Indianapolis Recorder, Mar. 5, 1949. the U.S. Justice Department, at the instigation of the NAACP, sued the Indianapolis Public Schools on behalf 30 “Schricker Backs School Bill,” Feb. 26, 1949, Indianapolis of a group of African American parents, based on Sec. Recorder; Andrew Ramsey, “Voice from the Gallery,” 407 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1971, federal Indianapolis Recorder, Mar. 19, 1949; Richardson and judge S. Hugh Dillin, found IPS guilty of maintaining a Baumgartel, “The History of the 1949 Indiana School racially segregated school system and ordered the transfer Desegregation Law,” Henry J. Richardson Papers, Indiana of African American students in Indianapolis by bus to Historical Society, 7. schools in eighteen suburban school systems in Marion and surrounding counties as well as undertake additional 31 “Indiana Legislature Passes Bill to Outlaw Segregated efforts to desegregate schools within IPS itself. See Indianapolis Recorder Schools,” , Mar. 5, 1949. Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, 154-60. See also Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, 32 “Indiana Legislature Passes Bill to Outlaw Segregated American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Schools,” Indianapolis Recorder, Mar. 5, 1949; Underclass (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, 1993); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass 146. Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The 33 Thornbrough,Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, New Press, 2012); Charles Mills, The Racial Contract 147; “Schricker Signs School Bill,” Indianapolis Recorder, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999). Mar. 12, 1949.

34 “Education Emancipated,” Indianapolis Recorder, Mar. 12, 1949; Willard Ransom to Gloster Current, Apr. 14, 1949, NAACP Papers; Andrew W. Ramsey, “Voice from the Gallery,” Indianapolis Recorder, Mar. 19, 1949.

FALL 2014 25 A “Voice from the Gallery” Andrew Ramsey and School Desegregation in Indianapolis

Modupe Labode

or more than a quarter of a century, the editorial pages of the most prominent African American newspaper in Indianapolis featured a lively column called “Voice from the Gallery.” From 1946 until his Fdeath in 1973, Andrew Ramsey, a “softspoken and urbane” African American teacher, wrote provocative essays for the weekly newspaper, the Indianapolis Recorder. Its subjects ranged widely from the commercialization of Christmas to basketball, yet remained united by the consistent themes of African American civil rights and the need to achieve a racially integrated country. In the words of the Recorder, Ramsey’s essays “battled the many-headed mon- ster of white supremacy” and confronted any “person or institution…which sins against the light of human liberty.” Ramsey’s experiences as a teacher at Indianapolis’s segregated Crispus Attucks High School informed his longstanding efforts to desegregate and integrate the city’s schools. The corpus of Ramsey’s writings reflect the work of an informed, politically active teacher and provide a valuable and rare perspective on the process of school desegregation as it evolved in a northern city.1 As school systems throughout the country continue to struggle with desegregation in the twenty- first century, activists and scholars from a variety of political perspectives have questioned the strategies of pursuing desegregation, revisited the promise of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and speculated about the importance of racial desegregation in public schools. Despite the national scope of school desegregation, much of the research has focused on the American South. Ambivalence about the experience of school desegregation has often eclipsed the reasons why activists sued school districts and urged desegregation. Andrew Ramsey’s urgent writings reveal the mindset of northern activ- Andrew Ramsey (1907-1973). ists who viewed school desegregation as essential to COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER 2 the struggle for African American equality. COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

26 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MODUPE LABODE

In his columns, Andrew Ramsey articulated his rationale for pursuing school desegregation, identified who was affected or harmed by racially segregated schools, and suggested actions African Americans and their allies could take to defeat segregation. Scholars Argun Saatcioglu and Jim Carl describe this process of articulation as “framing” and argue that in order for social and political change to be feasible, activists must frame the issue to be confronted in terms of “injustice, identity, and agency.” Much of the historical writing on school desegregation focuses on legislative actions and court rulings, but Ramsey’s writings show how grassroots activists responded to political and social changes as they worked toward their goal. Ramsey’s writings also reveal the changing ways in which activists, allies, and opponents understood school desegregation in the context of the larger civil rights struggle, from challenging racial segregation as a harmful practice in the 1940s to ambivalence about court-mandated busing for desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s.3 Historians have recently focused on the motivations and activities of “local people,” grassroots activists, and analyzed how their motivations intersected with national civil rights organization. Ramsey was such a local activist, and his writings reveal an acute awareness of how Indianapolis fit within the national civil rights effort. Further, his writing is grounded in his experience as a teacher. Historical analysis of teacher experiences of school desegregation is a relatively recent development. African American teachers often risked serious retribution, even dis- missal, if they advocated racial desegregation or belonged to civil rights organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). These conditions likely contribute to the relative scarcity of preserved historical sources generated by teachers. Recent oral histories of schoolteachers are invaluable, but Ramsey’s writings provide a rarely heard voice of a northern teacher commenting on, and participating in, school desegregation as it occurred.4 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Indianapolis was the state’s largest city and home to its largest African American community. Many African Americans (and native-born European Americans) migrated to Indiana from Ohio, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The city’s black population grew steadily, drawing migrants from small towns and rural settlements across Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee who headed north as part of the Great Migration. In 1910, African Americans comprised about nine percent of the city’s population. By 1950, about fifteen percent of Indianapolis was African American, reaching twenty-four percent in 1965. Because there were relatively few migrants from Central and Southern Europe, Mexico and Asia, race relations in Indianapolis had a stark white-black dynamic.5 Black migrants to the state faced pervasive institutionalized racism. After the Civil War, Indiana was the only northern state in which racial segregation of schools was legal. Until 1869, the state simply had barred African Americans from

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Crispus Attucks High School class. COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

the public schools. An 1877 statute permitted, but did not require, racial segregation of schools. In towns with a substantial African American population, many black students attended elementary schools that were unofficially segregated by race. By the end of the nineteenth century, African Americans convinced the state to employ black teachers and principals in all-black schools. African American and white students attended high schools together until the late 1920s, when school boards in the state’s largest cities—Indianapolis, Evansville, and Gary—authorized the creation of racially segregated high schools, overriding the protests of African American students, parents, and civil rights organizations. In 1927, Crispus Attucks High School opened in Indianapolis under a regime of segregation.6 Andrew W. Ramsey was born in McMinniville, Tennessee around 1907. By 1920, his parents, Joe and Leonorda, had moved Andrew and his siblings to Indianapolis, where the family settled in one of the city’s black neighborhoods. Although Joe Ramsey possessed an education, he worked as a laborer. Andrew graduated from the predominately white Emmerich Manual High School before attending Butler

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College (now University), a private liberal arts college in Indianapolis. He earned a baccalaureate and, in 1936, a master’s degree in French from Indiana University in Bloomington. Ramsey taught at African American colleges in North Carolina and Kentucky before returning to Indianapolis. In the 1930s, he began his long career at Crispus Attucks High School, where he taught French and Spanish. In 1937, Ramsey married his wife, Sophia, who was from Kentucky; the couple had no children.7 In addition to his teaching, Ramsey was an active member of Indianapolis’s “black public sphere,” the clubs, churches, newspapers, and organizations that historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham describes as constituting physical and imaginative spaces which nourished African American culture and politics. Ramsey was likely in contact with a wide swath of Indianapolis’s African American community, ranging from students’ parents to members of his frater- nity, and others in his religious denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Many African Americans accorded teachers a special status, increasing Ramsey’s influence. He also participated in interracial political, civic, and professional associations, some of which were dedicated to improving race relations, like the mayor’s Human Rights Commission. Ramsey was a leader in the local and state branch of the American Federation of Teachers and was an active member of the Democratic Party, even making several unsuccessful runs for a seat in the Indiana General Assembly. The scope of Ramsey’s activities meant that his personal network was broad, deep, and interracial.8 The breadth and depth of Ramsey’s connections aided his efforts as a committed civil rights activist. Colleagues recalled that, in the 1940s, Ramsey used his lunch hour to participate in sit-ins at downtown restaurants. Two decades later, he participated in efforts to protect the rights of migrant workers, most of whom were from the Southwest or Mexico. Ramsey was a longstanding member of the NAACP and held numerous leadership roles in the organization’s city and state branches, notably president of the Indianapolis Metropolitan branch. Because Indianapolis did not have a chapter of the Urban League or the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) until the 1960s, the NAACP held the line as the city’s principal civil rights organization. Despite its accomplishments, the membership of the Indianapolis NAACP remained relatively small.9 It is not clear how and why the Indianapolis Recorder approached Andrew Ramsey, but his public profile may have influenced the weekly’s decision to invite him to write a column. George Stewart, an African American, co-founded the Recorder in the late nineteenth cen- George P. Stewart (1874-1924). tury and the Stewart family controlled the paper COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER until the 1990s. African American newspapers have COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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historically played a significant role in the black public sphere, serving as sites where African Americans debate local and global issues. Unlike the largest newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier, which catered to a national readership, the Recorder was among the scores of local black newspapers that focused on issues directly affecting their readers. Editorials, news of African American life in Indianapolis and neighboring towns, and columns such as “Teen Talk” filled the Recorder’s pages. Syndicated articles and columns, many distrib- uted by the Associated Negro Press service, complemented local coverage, keeping the Recorder’s readers abreast of national and international issues. After World War II, the Recorder opposed both revolutionary Communism and acquiescence to Jim Crow policies. However, the paper’s support of fair employment practices, school desegregation, and open housing put it at odds with the majority of Indianapolis’s white establishment, who showed little interest in desegregation.10 The Recorder began running Ramsey’s column, “Voice from the Gallery” in 1947, yet left the significance of the column’s name unexplained. The phrase might have referred simply to the perspective that Ramsey took in his column, as a well-informed commentator who observed events at a distance. Readers familiar with his activities in the classroom and the community would have recognized the irony. The “gallery” may also have been a sardonic allusion to a feature of architectural segregation in Indianapolis and elsewhere, the balconies to which African Americans were relegated in theaters and arenas. If Ramsey intended this meaning, it was surely tongue in cheek, for he was a staunch opponent of Jim Crow.11 One of Andrew Ramsey’s earliest columns, “Our Concentration Camps,” sig- naled the deep, principled commitment to racial equality that would characterize his writing. He was convinced that American democracy and Christianity not only were consistent with racial equality, but would only be fulfilled with racial integration. He argued that the United States had to end its shameful history of physically segregating racial minorities, citing Native American reservations, World War II internment camps in which United States imprisoned thousands of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens, and urban “Negro ghettos.” This essay provides clues to the intellectual and cultural roots of Ramsey’s unsparing opposition to bigotry. The study of Negro history gave him a framework to analyze the contemporary racial situation, and Ramsey occasionally alluded to recent scholarship. Debates within the Disciples of Christ appear to have shaped his views on racial justice. Membership in the NAACP made him sympathetic to its analyses and strategies, but he went beyond reciting the organization’s policies to praise the contributions of community clubs and fraternities to civil rights struggles.12 Civil rights historians debate when and where the movement occurred. The Indianapolis experience of school desegregation suggests the importance of considering local factors when periodizing activism. Ramsey’s voice—alternately philosophical, erudite, and folksy—was part of the Recorder for several decades.

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Occasional letters to the editor praised and criticized him on specific points yet, in general, readers appear to have appreciated his opinions. Although it is impossible to determine how many readers he had, Ramsey’s activism and status in the black public sphere likely influenced the public’s reception of his writings. For more than three decades, readers followed Ramsey’s analysis of school segregation in Indianapolis. His articles about school desegregation can be divided into three periods: the 1940s and 1950s, which focused on striking down the legal impediments to desegregation; 1960-1968, which protested the increasing segregation of city schools; and the years from 1968 to Ramsey’s death in 1973, which followed the progress of a federal desegregation lawsuit.13

Making Segregation Illegal: 1947 to 1959 The post-war determination to extend democracy at home energized the civil rights movement in Indianapolis, as it did in other parts of the country. Interracial and interreligious coalitions challenged Jim Crow segregation in public accommodations and called for housing and fair employment opportunities for African Americans. The growing activism of African Americans in the South and President Harry S. Truman’s statements on civil rights gave Indianapolis activists a sense that there was a national momentum toward expanding civil rights.14 In his columns, Ramsey provided extensive commentary on local efforts to dismantle Jim Crow policies. He framed the events for his readers by naming and categorizing the attitudes and assumptions that hindered African Americans’ efforts to achieve racial equality, highlighting the effects of school desegregation policies on African American teachers, and by suggesting actions they could take toward achieving a racially integrated society. When framing events, Ramsey scolded, cajoled, and counseled his readers, not only to change their thinking, but also to use the vote and forms of protest to confront racial segregation. For many of Ramsey’s readers, the principal reasons why school segregation was offensive were self-evident: like all Jim Crow policies, school segregation was an expression of white supremacy and African American schools had fewer resources than their white counterparts. In his columns, Ramsey explained why integration was the ultimate goal. He first reminded readers that while desegregation only opened previously all-white institutions to African Americans, that alone did not guarantee racial equity. He castigated those whites, including self-described liber- als, for whom integration meant little more than “accepting Negroes into erst- while lily-white institutions at the lowest level while preserving white supremacy” throughout the rest of society. Integration, by contrast, meant true racial equality and was “the only way to achieve Christian democracy in this country.”15 For Ramsey, like most Indiana-based activists, the first step toward racial equality in the schools was repealing the law permitting racially segregated schools. An attempt to strike down the law failed in 1947 but did not abate

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Crispus Attucks High School, 1928. COURTESY OF THE W.H. BASS PHOTO CO. COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

lobbying efforts by the NAACP, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and other allies. Two years later, the governor signed a law banning de jure school segregation. Ramsey praised the unified effort of clubs, lodges, and fraternal organizations and claimed that white intransigence had energized “Negroes of all shades of opinion and all philosophies.”16 By the mid-1950s, Indiana’s smaller cities and towns had largely desegregated their schools, but in the state’s larger cities, administrators gerrymandered school district boundaries and engaged in more subtle practices designed to limit desegregation. In Indianapolis, a small number of African Americans attended formerly all-white elementary and high schools. However, as African Americans moved into historically white neighborhoods, the school system bused these students to schools outside their neighborhoods under the pretense that nearby majority- white schools were overcrowded. Crispus Attucks High School remained entirely African American.17 Desegregation likewise affected teachers. Nationwide, some African American educators supported segregation out of fear that they would lose their jobs when schools desegregated. The actions of the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners (IBSC) appeared to confirm these fears. Instead of transferring African American teachers and principals to predominately-white schools, the IBSC dismissed several, claiming either that there were no vacancies or no “qual- ified” African American teachers to fill existing vacancies. Further, as attendance at Crispus Attucks declined due to shifting residential patterns, the IBSC reas- signed several black high school teachers to elementary schools and claimed that these teachers had not been demoted because their salary remained unchanged.

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In contrast, the school board accommodated the preferences of white teachers by relying on voluntary instead of mandatory transfers, and few white teachers asked the board to transfer them to predominately-black schools. By the late 1950s, a handful of African American teachers taught at historically white high schools, and two white teachers joined the Crispus Attucks faculty, but the faculty and students at most elementary and high schools were dominated by one racial group or another.18 Andrew Ramsey was among the few Indianapolis commentators who highlighted the effects of the IBSC’s policies on African American teachers. His framing of this issue both countered those who cited job loss as a reason to oppose school desegregation and provided readers with several ways to support educators. First, he pointed readers to the policies of the NAACP, which was exploring ways to protect African American teachers as schools desegregated. Second, Ramsey argued that only with a strong union movement would teachers and other African American workers secure fair employment policies that would guarantee rights on the job. Ramsey, like many northern African Americans teachers, supported the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which, unlike its larger rival, the National Education Association, strongly supported desegregation. Readers who worked with the CIO on civil rights issues likely supported teachers’ unions, but Ramsey’s linking of unions and desegregation may have persuaded those who were otherwise suspi- cious of labor activism by teachers. Finally, Ramsey urged the IBSC to assign all teachers, regardless of their race, to schools “without regard to the racial composition of the student bodies.”19 The Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners ultimately decided school desegregation policies, and activists recognized that changing the composition of board membership would be complicated. From the late 1920s through 1964, a nebulous, powerful organization called the Citizens School Committee (CSC) handpicked every person elected to the school board. The CSC had over 200 members, men and women who represented various civic constituencies. Into the 1940s, all the members of the CSC were white, and not until 1955 did the CSC nominate its first black candidate to the school board. The CSC portrayed itself and school board policies as representative of mainstream Indianapolis—bipartisan, pro-business, and conservative, but not reactionary. Advocates of desegregation, including labor unions and the League of Women Voters, concluded that there would be little substantive progress toward school desegregation as long as the CSC controlled the school board.20 In his columns, what he perceived as the quietism and apathy displayed by many African Americans often exasperated Ramsey. In one column, he tried to shock his readers into action by addressing them as “My Fellow Second-Class Citizens.” This demeanor, which so frustrated Ramsey, may have been a mani- festation of the circumspect nature of protest in Indianapolis, what historian

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Richard Pierce calls “polite protest.” Prominent African Americans, including clergy, business owners and professionals, met quietly with sympathetic whites and engaged in “face-to-face dialogue and lengthy committee deliberation” to advocate for equality. This approach ensured that, to some extent, African Americans could create interracial alliances and preserve some real economic and political gains. However, Pierce argues, the “result was a negotiated freedom, one that was a product of a seemingly constant contest between African Americans and their allies and the forces that preferred a city replete with discrimination and limited civil rights for black citizens.”21 School desegregation revealed the limits of this strategy. In the 1950s, few whites saw the matter urgent. Instead, articles in majority-white newspapers congratulated Indianapolis for its progress in school desegregation, in compari- son to the racial tumult engulfing the South. In this atmosphere, those African Americans interested in pursuing strategies of “polite protest” to address school desegregation found few white partners. 22 Ramsey used the tactic of framing to dismantle the arguments of whites and African Americans who, from fear or self-interest, supported the racial status quo in Indianapolis. By attacking these arguments, Ramsey hoped that African Americans would more clearly evaluate race relations in Indianapolis. He skew- ered the faulty logic of prominent whites who asserted that because race relations in the city appeared quiet, Indianapolis did not have problems of racial inequality. Building on this point and directing his comments to African Americans, he assailed the inherent defeatism of accepting racism in Indianapolis on the assumption that it was not as abhorrent as southern bigotry. Ramsey quoted lawyer Thurgood Marshall, who reportedly quipped, “Just because Mississippi is hell is not proof that Indianapolis is heaven.” In 1956, during the height of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, Ramsey tried to shame African Americans into action by highlighting the bravery of their southern counterparts and reminding his northern compatriots that, when compared to the grim conditions in the South, Indianapolis was not as advanced as they believed, noting that Indianapolis had “more all-Negro” and all-white schools than “Montgomery, because we are a larger city.”23 He likewise rebuked African Americans whose actions or ideologies he believed hindered the struggle for racial equality. “[B]lack chauvinists,” who argued that segregation provided economic or psychological benefits, or who, like members of the Nation of Islam, advocated black separatism, received scath- ing denouncements. Ramsey harshly criticized African Americans who valorized intraracial class and color differences, welcoming the diminishing influence of “Negro Society,” the bourgeoisie. The conspicuous exclusivity of the black bourgeoisie, he argued, “violates the fundamental concept of democracy; it runs counter to Christian doctrine and it goes against the current of history.”24

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“Voice from the Gallery,” Indianapolis Recorder (detail). February 15, 1969. COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER DIGITAL COLLECTION HOSTED BY IUPUI UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

For all Ramsey’s involvement with African American civil rights and history, he was clear that race, as a biological category, had no real meaning, but was instead a “modern superstition.” The people classified as “Negro” were not unified by blood he asserted, but by “discrimination and the rejections foisted upon them by the majority.” “The Negro ‘race’,” he concluded, “is, then, a contrived race” whose members were “forced together as a group apart from other natural groups and treated as an alien people, as untouchables.” As remarkably modern as was Ramsey’s insistence on race as a constructed category, it emanated from his deeply held belief in racial integration, since humans were ultimately equal.25

Confronting School Segregation: 1960 to 1968 In the early 1960s, the civil rights landscape shifted as new youth-oriented activist organizations, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee introduced innovative forms of protest and the U.S. Congress and state legislatures passed civil rights legislation. The Indiana legislature created a civil rights commission and passed statutes opening public accommodations without regard to race. In Indianapolis, the range and number of civil rights organizations increased as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, and Urban League established local branches. More whites, ranging from individual

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religious leaders to labor activists to the League of Women Voters, collaborated with African Americans to address racial inequality. The implication of these changes for school desegregation, however, was not immediately clear.26 While other northern cities took voluntary steps toward desegregation, often in the hopes of avoiding lawsuits, the Indianapolis school board resolutely ignored proposals for confronting school segregation. Initially the school board’s strategy appeared justified as numerous lawsuits challenging segregation in other cities failed. For example, in 1962, a federal court found that the city of Gary, Indiana, had not deliberately segregated its schools by race. Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made little impression on the head of the Citizens School Committee who maintained that the statute did not require “assignment to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.” Yet, after years of protest and organizing, activists finally won a victory over the CSC in 1964, successfully electing the first school board members without that organization’s support. Still, conservatives on the issue of race retained control of the board.27 In his columns, Ramsey continued to urge the city to engage in school desegregation with greater speed and commitment. He used his own experiences to frame the IBSC’s reluctance to transfer African American teachers to predominately white schools. After the school board ignored his repeated transfer requests Ramsey filed a complaint with the Indiana Civil Rights Commission. He won and in July 1965, Ramsey announced in his column that he was leaving Crispus Attucks High School, where he had taught for nearly three decades, to teach at a predominately-white high school. He explained that the move was not out of dissatisfaction with Crispus Attucks, nor was he being “promoted.” In framing his transfer, Ramsey argued that school segregation particularly harmed white students, teachers, and families. The racially segregated “lily- white schools” were “inferior” because “they blind their pupils to the fact that America is a multi- racial nation and that minority children are not representatives of subhuman species.”28 During the 1960s, Ramsey’s arguments about school desegregation shifted as he began to weave them into his longstanding commentary on discriminatory housing. Since the 1940s, he advocated open housing laws, discussed how “slum clearance” measures harmed poor African Americans, welcomed legal challenges to racially restrictive cove- Indianapolis Recorder Carrier. nants, and argued that persistent residential segrega- COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER tion harmed society by making interactions among COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

36 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MODUPE LABODE ethnic and racial groups difficult. Many whites, he observed, quickly decamped when African Americans moved to their neighborhoods, and the school board redesigned boundaries to ensure that schools would remain largely racially segregated. The school board also authorized construction of new schools in areas dominated by one racial group or another, essentially perpetuating segregated schools. Indeed, the number of predominately African American schools in Indianapolis was increasing, a process that Ramsey and others called “resegregation.”29 Ramsey provided his readers with ways to respond to opponents of desegregation who maintained that the racial composition of schools resulted from natural residential housing patterns. These opponents argued that children should attend neighborhood schools and portrayed busing as repugnant. Ramsey countered by pointing to African American students who rode buses in order to preserve segregation, and forcefully deflected the “neighborhood school” concept as simply ideological cover for segregationists who did not want to be labeled as racists. Further, he ridiculed the proposition that once neighborhoods were desegregated, students could attend their neighborhood schools; waiting for desegregated neighborhoods meant delaying school desegregation indefinitely.30 The IBSC’s reluctance to desegregate became starkly apparent with the announcement of its “Shortridge Plan.” In the late 1950s, an increasing number of African American families moved into the catchment area of Shortridge High School. As more African American students attended the school, alarmed whites fretted that the “high proportion of economically and culturally disadvantaged young people” threatened the school’s standards. In 1965, Richard Lugar, the vice-president of the school board, who had been elected on the Citizens School Committee slate, proposed the “Shortridge Plan.” Only the city’s most academi- cally able students would be admitted to the school, and neighborhood students who failed to meet the standards would have to pay for their own transportation to other schools. Many whites who championed the plan considered themselves liberal on race relations and argued that it would create “racial balance.” African Americans countered that the plan’s goal was to limit the number of black students attending a high school that had a reputation for high academic standards.31 In a series of columns denouncing the “Shortridge Plan” as a way for privileged whites to avoid desegregation, Ramsey demonstrated his skill in analyzing and framing a policy. Ramsey lampooned Richard Lugar as a “beamish boy” who expected praise for having slain Indianapolis’s Jabberwocky, “the Negro invasion of Shortridge,” yet was baffled when the public responded with vitriol. Ramsey reprinted elaborately polite letters that he and Lugar exchanged. Lugar protested that he supported desegregation and lamented that Ramsey and other black teachers did not counsel more African American parents to send their children to predominately-white high schools. Ramsey exposed the double-standard implicit in the IBSC’s concern about the demographic shifts at Shortridge, while accepting

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Shortridge High School, 1950. COURTESY OF THE W.H. BASS PHOTO CO. COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

“100 per cent racial imbalance” at Crispus Attucks. Despite protest from African Americans and some whites, the Shortridge Plan began in 1966 and effectively created a white enclave at the school. However, when the school board terminated the plan in the early 1970s, Shortridge quickly became a black-majority school.32 In this atmosphere of white intransigence, Ramsey maintained his commitment to racial integration, even though Indianapolis’s power brokers appeared resistant to even minimal change. As he criticized the increasingly confronta- tional, even violent, approaches that various African American groups employed, Ramsey also acknowledged the real frustration behind unrest. He echoed the position of the Indiana NAACP when he cautioned against school boycotts as a way to achieve change in the schools. Instead, by the mid-1960s, Ramsey began to argue that Indianapolis schools would achieve desegregation only with the intervention of the courts.33

The School Desegregation Lawsuit: 1968 to 1973 As president of the local branch of the NAACP, Andrew Ramsey played a crucial role in initiating the school desegregation lawsuit by helping the parents of African American students file a complaint about racial discrimination with the federal Department of Justice. This complaint launched an investigation that found evidence of systematic racial discrimination in Indianapolis schools. The IBSC failed to make a substantive response and in May 1968, the Department of Justice filed suit against the IBSC for unlawfully discriminating against African Americans in the assignment of both teachers and students to elementary and high schools. For many in Indianapolis, this legal intervention may have been a surprise, but Ramsey had anticipated it for years.34

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Numerous factors complicated the legal effort to compel Indianapolis to desegregate its schools. Richard Pierce notes that “Indianapolis fought school desegregation with a ferocity rarely matched by any northern city.” During the course of the lawsuit, the school board assiduously maintained that it had not racially segregated schools, rejected the judge’s offers to negotiate at crucial junc- tures, and tended to appeal each verdict. On the other side of the aisle, the philosophies of the Department of Justice nearly reversed during the case. Initiated under the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the lawsuit garnered far less enthusiasm from the Justice Department lawyers appointed by President Richard Nixon. At times, the local plaintiffs felt that they were working in opposition to their ostensible federal allies. Lastly, Justice S. Hugh Dillin, the presiding judge, delayed decisions as he waited on pertinent rulings from the Supreme Court that altered the legal landscape of school desegregation. Not until 1981 was the case resolved, making it the longest school desegregation trial in the state.35 Ramsey’s framing of the school desegregation lawsuit expressed his tempered faith in the judicial process. He acknowledged that the process of desegregation would have large, sometimes unwelcome effects on African Americans, but believed that such inequities were worthwhile in order to achieve integration. Ramsey possessed little nostalgia for racially segregated schools and welcomed their end. Many African Americans in Indianapolis, however, did not endorse his framing of how desegregation should be achieved.36 In a column written after the Department of Justice initiated the lawsuit, Ramsey expressed hope that the IBSC would be open to negotiation. There was reason for cautious optimism. Motivated by the lawsuit, the ISBC initiated mandatory transfers of teachers to address racial segregation in the 1968-1969 school year. The Indianapolis Education Association (IEA), the city’s largest teachers union, initially decried mandatory transfers and some white teachers took legal action or resigned rather than teach at predominately black schools. Whites who opposed busing backed the IEA, fearing that mandatory assignment of teachers was a precursor to mandatory busing. Ramsey had long championed the mandatory reassignment of teachers, as had his union, the Indianapolis Federation of Teachers. Many African Americans did not share Ramsey’s support of the policy. Students at Crispus Attucks staged a walk out to protest the large-scale reassignment of African American teachers. Although the process of desegregating the faculty was rocky, the IBSC and the Department of Justice settled this aspect of the lawsuit out of court.37 In another effort to address the legal complaint, the IBSC proposed closing Shortridge and Crispus Attucks high schools, which were almost entirely African American, and implementing busing among the city’s remaining high schools. The alumni of both schools vehemently protested the plan. Ramsey, who taught at Shortridge, described himself as a “phase-out” and professed incredulity that

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anyone would support keeping Attucks open. He allowed that the IBSC’s decision was flawed, but asserted that the effect of the decision on him was a “small price to see justice done at last.” As with the reassignment of African American teachers, Ramsey’s principled, flinty assessment was at odds with many African Americans who either viewed Crispus Attucks with pride or asserted that desegregation did not require closing historic African American institutions. Some members of the Indianapolis NAACP observed that the current policy placed the burden of desegregation on African Americans. Ultimately, the IBSC abandoned their attempts to desegregate the city’s high schools, conceding that the issue would be addressed in court.38 The first trial began in 1971 and ended with the presiding judge, S. Hugh Dillin, concluding that Indianapolis had deliberately and unlawfully maintained racially segregated schools. In his decision, Dillin followed the precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation case Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. He suggested that a desegregation plan could include other school districts in Marion County, including suburb and township schools, as well as Indianapolis public schools. Such an interdistrict plan required school busing, leading Dillin to order township schools, as well as the state of Indiana, to become defen- dants in the case. In a closely divided vote, the IBSC decided to appeal the decision to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1973, this court upheld Dillin’s decision and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case, leaving intact the judgment finding Indianapolis guilty of perpetuating de jure segregation. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals then sent the issue of the involvement of the state and suburban schools back to the district court. Judge Dillin prepared for a second trial, which would focus on the methods by which schools were to be desegregated.39 Many African Americans were heartened by the result of the 1971 case. Dillin’s opinion officially validated what many had long believed, that the IBSC had unlawfully segregated the schools by race. In his first column after the decision, Ramsey modestly omitted his involvement in the suit, and instead focused on the inadequate response to the ruling by Mayor Lugar and his Democratic opponent in the mayoral race. By contrast, an Indianapolis Recorder article applauded the outcome as a result of Ramsey’s commitment to equality and clever maneuvering through power structures. Ramsey “believes in going through channels while car- rying a ‘big stick’,” the author reported, “which he deftly uses when necessary.”40 The school board’s commitment to resisting desegregation continued, however, and the 1972 school board election revealed that many in Indianapolis rejected Dillin’s decision. A new group, the Committee for Neighborhood Schools, promoted a slate of candidates distinguished by their opposition to busing and won all the open seats. The new school board swiftly indicated its hostility to desegregation, dismissing the law firm representing the IBSC in the school desegregation lawsuit and firing the superintendent of schools.41

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Inner City Youth Council with Mayor Richard Lugar, seated center. COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

As the legal maneuvers continued, Ramsey extended the scope of his commentary to include the ways in which local and national politicians used educational policies to express contempt and fear of African Americans. During the 1972 presidential primaries, Ramsey bitterly criticized both Richard Nixon and segregationist George Wallace for their opposition to busing. In Ramsey’s analysis, national politicians competed for white votes by engaging in race-baiting by deploying racially-coded terms such as “neighborhood schools,” “freedom of choice,” as well as “busing.” Despite what he viewed as the excesses of “the worst blossoming of white racism since the turn of the century,” Ramsey did not despair, but instead urged African Americans to organize.42 During this period, Ramsey’s columns began to engage a new topic, student activism. Ramsey attempted to soothe the minds of readers who were alarmed by the rise in student activism since the 1970s. Ramsey encouraged student protest, even picketing an appearance by Mississippi segregationist Governor Ross Barnett with a student. When discussing student activism in schools, Ramsey saw the students as responding to real injustice and he decried the strong-arm tac- tics administrators used to punish African American students. In one incident, twenty students and adults were arrested for confronting a Shortridge official who attempted to discipline an African American student for wearing a “Black Power” t-shirt. The district attorney proposed bringing the students and adults to trial for disorderly conduct. Ramsey blamed this incident not on the t-shirt-wearing

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student, but on the “large reservoir of white racism in the school.” He observed that, “Black children are mentally rejected by many school administrators, teachers and white parents because it is virtually impossible for most of them to con- form as far as skin color is concerned.”43 Although Ramsey appreciated student activism, he was skeptical of the black studies departments and black student unions emerging at high schools, colleges, and universities. He characterized these organizations, like the Nation of Islam, as rooted in “black chauvinism,” a perspective antithetical to his commitment to racial integration. His criticism of student unions was more than ideological; it was grounded in matters of strategy. Instead of forming unrecognized unions of students, if students used community-based civil-rights organizations like those of the NAACP or SCLC, he believed that students would have more leverage in their disputes with administrators.44 He also acted strategically when, through his analysis of local, state and national issues, he wove commentary about personal issues that many of his readers would have identified with. In January 1972, when Andrew Ramsey and his wife went out to dinner in Indianapolis, three young African American men approached the older man, robbed, and beat him. While he was still recovering, Ramsey wrote a column that placed his mugging in the context of other crimes in society, such as the “crime of white racism” seen vividly in the “rash of anti- busing bills now in the hopper of the Indiana General Assembly.” In a column announcing his retirement from teaching, Ramsey reviewed his career in educational institutions, from age six onward, as one framed by racial segregation and white supremacy. He reflected that the racism he found as a pupil remained “in too many classrooms, principals’ offices” and the school system’s administrative offices. Ramsey stoutly concluded, “As an ex-employee, I am here dedicating myself to work for its [racism in the schools] complete elimination.”45 In May 1973, Andrew Ramsey died at age 66. Obituaries and letters to the Recorder praised his personality, courage, and independent voice. One eulogy written by a friend concluded that “Andrew, in the final analysis, was more often right than wrong in his stand on the issues.” In an effort to continue Ramsey’s commitment to writing about civic activism, the Indianapolis Recorder ran a column, “Dear Andrew,” by Indianapolis educator and activist Robert De Frantz. Several of Ramsey’s colleagues, acknowledging that his contributions went beyond his column, described the desegregation lawsuit as his most important legacy.46 At the time of his death, few could have anticipated the outcome of the case, which might lead one to doubt this optimistic assessment. The second trial occurred a few months after Ramsey passed away. In July 1973, Judge Dillin held that the state of Indiana was responsible for de jure segregation and, relying on the federal court rulings in the Detroit school desegregation case Milliken v. Bradley, the judge ordered an interdistrict measure. However,

42 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MODUPE LABODE

United States District Court, Southern District of Indiana. Judge S. Hugh Dillin, center. COURTESY OF THE INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Dillin found that the suburban school systems had not participated in segregation, in part because so few African Americans historically lived in those areas. Although some whites would be bused, African American students would com- prise the vast majority of students bused from the Indianapolis public schools to predominately white township schools. This feature of the ruling dismayed African Americans who hoped for equitable, “two-way” busing, in which white and black students would be bused between the Indianapolis and suburban schools. Appeals and legal maneuvers continued until late 1980, when the Supreme Court declined a review, exhausting the IBSC’s options. Although a sizable number of students had been bused to schools within Indianapolis Public School system since 1971, not until the fall of 1981 did the Indianapolis school system began implementing the court-ordered, interdistrict busing for school desegregation. In 1998, the Department of Justice determined that the Indianapolis public school system was “unitary,” or desegregated, and approved a phase-out plan for the court-monitored desegregation. Between 1999 and 2004, the school districts initiated plans to phase out court-ordered busing for desegregation, a process that is scheduled to end by 2017. The negotiated settlement also included a measure to address continued segregation in housing.47 Andrew Ramsey’s insights on school desegregation contribute toward a complex and multifaceted understanding of the local efforts that comprised the national movement to desegregate the nation’s schools. Through his writings, the mosaic of issues shaping the struggle to achieve racial desegregation in Indianapolis emerges. This perspective is not available when the focus is only on the passage of laws or the decisions of judges.

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Andrew Ramsey Park, W. 42nd St., Indianapolis. Photo by author.

Ramsey did not claim to speak for anyone other than himself, but his lucid writing provides insights into a range of attitudes about school desegregation circulating both in the black public sphere and among whites in Indianapolis. Although his framing of issues shifted, Ramsey’s consistent support of school desegregation indicates that he—and those who shared his view—believed that desegregation was central to the larger civil rights movement. As a staunch advocate of integration, Ramsey saw school desegregation as an important step toward achieving a just society. This idealism, grounded in his religious faith and belief in democratic ideals, provided the foundation for Ramsey’s ceaseless writing and activism as he worked towards his ultimate goal of creating a racially integrated America. Although Andrew Ramsey did not live to see the resolution of the legal case he helped initiate, his voice from the gallery transformed the architecture of segregation in Indianapolis.

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1 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the element of regret or nostalgia for segregation that runs editors for their insightful comments and extraordinary through many African American teachers’ retrospective patience. I would also like to thank Richard Joya who accounts of school desegregation. See, for example, combed through numerous rolls of microfilm as part Adam Fairclough, “The Costs of Brown: Black Teachers of an IUPUI independent study project. Emma Lou and School Integration,” Journal of American History 91 Thornbrough,Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century (2004), 43-55; Barbara Shircliffe, “‘We Got the Best of (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 259- That World’: A Case for the Study of Nostalgia in the 260fn43; “Race Relations Honor Roll,” Indianapolis Oral History of School Segregation,” Oral History Review Recorder, Jan. 5, 1952. Andrew Ramsey, “Basketball, the 28 (Summer-Autumn 2001), 59-84. Hoosier Opiate,” Indianapolis Recorder, Feb. 19, 1955; Andrew Ramsey, “Christians Should Abandon Christmas,” 5 Thornbrough,Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, Indianapolis Recorder, Dec. 23, 1961. 3-4, 35, 116.

2 For recent discussions of school desegregation in 6 Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 65-66, 152-53; William academic and popular media, see Clayborne Carson, E. Marsh, “The Indianapolis Experience: The Anatomy “Two Cheers for Brown v. Board of Education,” Journal of a Desegregation Case,” Indiana Law Review 9 (June of American History 91 (June 2004), 26-31; Nikole 1976), 897-898; Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks in the Hannah-Jones, “Segregation Now…,” The Atlantic 313 Twentieth Century, 140-141; Richard Pierce, Polite (May 2014): 68-81; David Kirp, “Making Schools Protest: The Political Economy of Race in Indianapolis, Work,” New York Times, May 20, 2012; Keven Gaines, 1920-1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, “Whose Integration Was It? An Introduction,” Journal 2005), 3-8, 26-33. of American History 91 (June 2004), 19-25. For school Senior Booster desegregation in the North, see Adina Back, “Still 7 Emmerich Manual High School, , June The Drift, Butler Yearbooks. Unequal: A Fiftieth Anniversary Reflection on Brown 1925, 21-22; Butler University, v. Board of Education,” Radical History Review 90 (Fall 1930, Book 17: 38, 88, http://digitalcommons.butler. 2004), 62-69; Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: edu/buyearbooks/17; 1910 United States Census, Civil The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New District No. 9, Warren County, Tennessee; 1930 U.S. York: Random House, 2008). Census, Ward 4, Indianapolis, Indiana; 1940 U.S. Census, Ward 7, Indianapolis, Indiana; Indianapolis City Directory, 3 Argun Saatcioglu and Jim Carl, “The Discursive Turn (Indianapolis: R.L. Polk, 1920), 1176; The Attucks: Crispus in School Desegregation: National Patterns and a Case Attucks Year Book (Indianapolis: Crispus Attucks High Analysis of Cleveland, 1973-1998,” Social Science History School, 1936), 7; Gordon C. Raeburn, “State Probes 35 (Spring 2011), 59-108. Race Complaint of Attucks French Teacher,” Indianapolis Times, Nov. 19, 1964; Emma Lou Thornbrough. “The 4 For studies of the local dimension of the civil rights Indianapolis Story, School Segregation and Desegregation movement, see Emilye Crosby, ed., Civil Rights History in a Northern City, 1993,” Manuscript and Visual from the Ground Up: Local Struggles of a National Collections Department, William Henry Smith Memorial Movement (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia, 2011); Library, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Indiana John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights (hereafter IHS), 86-87, 196-197; “‘Voice from the Gallery’ in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Silenced,” Indianapolis Recorder, May 19, 1973. For teachers and school desegregation, see Davison M. Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern 8 For the black public sphere, see Evelyn Brooks School Segregation, 1865-1954 (New York: Cambridge Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s University Press, 2005); Adam Fairclough, A Class Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 7-13. For (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Crispus Attucks High School, see Paul R. Mullins and Press, 2007); Michael Fultz, “African American Teachers Glenn S. White, The Price of Progress: IUPUI, the Color in the South, 1890-1940: Powerlessness and the Ironies Line and Urban Displacement (Indianapolis: Indiana of Expectations and Protest,” History of Education University-Purdue University Indianapolis, 2010), 75-76, Quarterly 35 (Winter 1995), 401-422; Sonya Ramsey, 84. For Ramsey’s activities, see “It Was All Greek to Us,” “‘We Will Be Ready Whenever They Are’: African Indianapolis Recorder, Jan. 3, 1942; Andrew Ramsey, American Teachers’ Responses to the Brown Decision “Saga of a Man Buying a Gift for His Beloved Spouse,” and Public School Integration in Nashville, Tennessee, Indianapolis Recorder, June 29, 1957; Andrew Ramsey, 1954-1966,” Journal of African American History 90 “Sepia Bridge Players Bid for Integration,” Indianapolis (Winter 2005), 29-51. For reprisals taken against African Recorder, March 18, 1961; Andrew Ramsey, “In Politics, American teachers in the South, see Fairclough, A Class Ye Scribe Is Still on the Case,” Indianapolis Recorder, of Their Own, 367-371. Some scholars note the strong Apr. 11, 1970; “‘Voice from the Gallery’ Silenced.”

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9 Thornbrough,Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, 15 Andrew Ramsey, “Integration Newest Double-Talk of 29-30; Charles S. Preston, “Fight for Leadership on in Racists,” Indianapolis Recorder, May 17, 1952; Andrew Local NAACP Branch,” Indianapolis Recorder, Nov. 28, Ramsey, “Desegregation is Not Integration,” Indianapolis 1959; “‘Voice from the Gallery’ Silenced”; Ollie Weeks, Recorder, July 21, 1956. “In Memoriam,” Indianapolis Recorder, June 16, 1973; David Williams, “Ramsey Made Me What I Am Today,” 16 Pierce, Polite Protest, 36-47; Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks Indianapolis Recorder, June 23, 1973; Mason Bryant, in the Twentieth Century, 144-147; Andrew Ramsey, “We “Mason Bryant Praises Ramsey,” Indianapolis Recorder, Achieve Practical Unity in a Time of Crisis,” Indianapolis May 26, 1973. Recorder, Mar. 19, 1949, 10.

10 Thornbrough,Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, 17 Dwight W. Culver, “Racial Desegregation in Education 13-14; Finding Aid for Indianapolis Recorder Newspaper in Indiana,” Journal of Negro Education 23 (Summer Collection, 1893-1990, IHS; Roland Edgar Wolseley, The 1954), 296-302; Thornbrough, “The Indianapolis Story,” Black Press, U.S.A. (Ames, Ia.: Iowa State University Press, 128-129. 1971). For the Associated Negro Press, see Lawrence D. Hogan, A Black National News Service: The Associated 18 Paul Cooke, “Safeguards for Negro Teachers in an Negro Press and Claude Barnett, 1919-1945 (Cranbury, Integrated School System in Washington, D.C.,” Journal of Negro Education N.J.: Associated University Press, 1984). 20 (Autumn 1951), 588-590; Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 109-110, 11 Robert R. Weyeneth, “The Architecture of Racial 181-183; Albert W. Spruill, “The Negro Teacher in the Segregation: The Challenges of Preserving the Process of Desegregation of Schools,” Journal of Negro Problematical Past,” The Public Historian 27 (Fall 2005), Education 29 (Winter 1960), 80-84; Jonas Rosenthal, 19-20. The first column to appear under the tagline “Negro Teachers’ Attitudes toward Desegregation,” “Voice from the Gallery” was “Providing Our Own Journal of Negro Education 26 (Winter 1957), 63-71; Philanthropy,” Indianapolis Recorder, May 17, 1947. Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, Thank you to the anonymous reviewer who pointed out 149; Thornbrough, “The Indianapolis Story,” 135-136, the ambiguity in the title “Voice from the Gallery.” 141, 142.

12 Andrew Ramsey, “Our Concentration Camps,” 19 Andrew Ramsey, “Public Needs Education to Smooth Indianapolis Recorder, Apr. 12, 1947. Ramsey discusses Path of Integration,” Indianapolis Recorder, Apr. 20, C. Van Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow 1955; Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 237-265; (1955) in Andrew Ramsey, “Jim Crow, A 20th Century Fairclough, A Class of Their Own, 358-361; Fultz, “The Baby,” Indianapolis Recorder, Mar. 31, 1956. Nancy Displacement of Black Educators,” 11-45; Rolland Nakano Conner, “From Internment to Indiana: Japanese Dewing, “The American Federation of Teachers and Americans, the War Relocation Authority, the Disciples Desegregation,” Journal of Negro Education 42 (Winter of Christ, and Citizen Committees in Indianapolis,” 1973), 79-92; Rolland Dewing, “Teacher Organizations Indiana Magazine of History 102 (June 2006), 89-116; and Desegregation,” Phi Delta Kappan 49 (Jan. 1968), Colbert S. Cartwright, “The Christian Churches 257-260; Ramsey, “Integration Newest Double-Talk of (Disciples of Christ): As Racial Ferment Accelerates, Racists”; Andrew Ramsey, “The NAACP Girds for all-out Pastors and Congregations Take Divided Stand on Issue,” School Integration Fight,” Indianapolis Recorder, Feb. Christianity and Crisis 18 (Mar. 3, 1958), 20-22. 26, 1955; Andrew Ramsey, “Union Teachers’ Confab Supports Integration,” Indianapolis Recorder, July 6, 1958; 13 Clarence Lang, “Locating the Civil Rights Movement: Andrew Ramsey, “Union Teachers Continue to Fight An Essay on the Deep South, Midwest, and Border for Civil Rights,” Indianapolis Recorder, Sept. 2, 1967; South in Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of Social Andrew Ramsey, “Unionism, Racism, Democracy, Black History 47 (Winter 2013), 317-400; Marjorie L. Turner, Powerism in Gotham’s Teachers’ Strike,” Indianapolis “Reader Defends Billy Graham after Columnist’s Recorder, Nov. 23, 1968. ‘Attack’,” Indianapolis Recorder, Oct. 3 1959; William Ingram, “Columnist’s Article Should Be Read by All 20 “Business Leader Quits Citizens School Group,” Northern Negroes,” Indianapolis Recorder, Nov. 14, Indianapolis Recorder, Oct. 31, 1959; Thornbrough, “The 1959; Very Rev. Paul Moore, Jr., “Christ Church Dean Indianapolis Story,” 58, 59-63, 101, 149; Thornbrough, Says Ramsey Column Is ‘Unique Service,’” Indianapolis Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, 143, 149-150; Recorder, Feb. 6, 1960. Dick Franzen, “Let’s Talk Problem out, Says Hawkins,” Indianapolis News, July 22, 1964; Marsh, “Indianapolis 14 Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 219-220, 227-265; Experience,” 898-899. Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New 21 Andrew Ramsey, “Open Letter to the Negroes of Press, 2009), 355-367. Indianapolis,” Indianapolis Recorder, Sept. 13, 1952;

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quote in Pierce, Polite Protest, 2. Also, Pierce, Polite Century, 154. Protest, 35-47; Andrew Ramsey, “1954: Year of Promises and Disappointments,” Indianapolis Recorder, 29 For resegregation, see Gary Orfield and Chungmei Jan. 1, 1955. Lee, Racial Transformation and the Changing Nature of Segregation (Cambridge, Mass.: The Civil Rights Project 22 Representative articles about school desegregation in at Harvard University, 2006); Gary Orfield and Erica Indianapolis and Ramsey’s commentary include David Frankenberg, with Jongyeon Ee and John Kuscera, Brown Watson, “Pupils Ease Racial Issue Here,” Indianapolis at 60: Great Progress, a Long Retreat, and an Uncertain Times, Oct. 10, 1954; Hortense Myers, “Integration Future (Los Angeles: The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Easier Than City Expected,” Indianapolis News, May Derechos Civiles, 2014). Andrew Ramsey, “Even Modern 14, 1956; Hortense Myers, “Many Help Smooth Way Ghettoes Are Objectionable,” Indianapolis Recorder, Mar. for City’s School Integration,” Indianapolis News, May 5, 1949; Andrew Ramsey, “Segregation—the Root of 15, 1956; “Integration Report on Our City Schools,” Civil Rights Agitation,” Indianapolis Recorder, Sept. 27, Indianapolis Times, Jan. 9, 1957. 1952; Andrew Ramsey, “Residential Segregation Chief Obstacle to Integration,” Indianapolis Recorder, Aug. 3, 23 Ramsey, “The NAACP Girds for all-out School 1957; Andrew Ramsey, “The NAACP Trains Its Guns Integration Fight”; Andrew Ramsey, “Indianapolis’ vs on Housing Segregation,” Indianapolis Recorder, July 25, Montgomery’s Integration Record,” Indianapolis Recorder, 1959. Mar. 24, 1956; “Mrs. Daisy Bates to Tell Little Rock Inside Story,” Indianapolis Recorder, Mar. 15, 1958. For 30 Andrew Ramsey, “Now You See It,” Indianapolis Recorder, Ramsey’s condemnation of white hypocrisy, see: Andrew Sept. 29, 1962; Andrew Ramsey, “What Is Wrong with Ramsey, “Court Ruling and the NAACP,” Indianapolis Bussing Children,” Indianapolis Recorder, May 30, 1964; Recorder, May 29, 1954; Andrew Ramsey, “Rights Foes Andrew Ramsey, “…Given a Stone instead of Bread,” Get Aid, Comfort from Hoosier Sophistry,” Indianapolis Indianapolis Recorder, June 19, 1965; Andrew Ramsey, Recorder, July 27, 1957; Andrew Ramsey, “South Not “Negroes Cannot Solve de facto Segregation Problem,” Alone in Racial Barbarism,” Indianapolis Recorder, Aug. Indianapolis Recorder, Sept. 18, 1965; Andrew Ramsey, 31, 1957; Andrew Ramsey, “Is U.S. North to Be the Last “Twelve Years Later,” Indianapolis Recorder, Sept. 17, Bastion of Racism?” Indianapolis Recorder, Oct. 31, 1959. 1966; Andrew Ramsey, “Shall the Power Structure Continue to Run the Schools?” Indianapolis Recorder, 24 Andrew Ramsey, “Lack of Clearly Defined Negro Nov. 11, 1967. ‘Society’ Fortunate,” Indianapolis Recorder, Jan. 19, 1952; Ramsey, “Integration Newest Double-Talk of Racists”; 31 Richard Green Lugar served on the Indianapolis school Andrew Ramsey, “Negro Impediments to Complete board from 1964 to 1967, as mayor of Indianapolis from Integration,” Indianapolis Recorder, Feb. 8, 1958; Andrew 1968 to 1975, and in the U.S. Senate as a Republican Ramsey, “Moslem Sect Symptomatic of Racial Ills,” from 1977 to 2013. Thornbrough, “The Indianapolis Indianapolis Recorder, Oct. 10, 1959. Story,” 190-193, 207-222 (quote 207), 572fn12; Andrew Ramsey, “Maybe Shortridge High School Needs 25 Andrew Ramsey, “Race and Rumors of Race,” a Grandfather Clause,” Indianapolis Recorder, Apr. Indianapolis Recorder, Mar. 5, 1960. 14, 1956; Andrew Ramsey, “Solution of Shortridge’s Problems up to Shortridge,” Indianapolis Recorder, May Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century 26 Thornbrough, , 18, 1957. 164-167; Thornbrough, “The Indianapolis Story,” 167- 174, 183-189; Pierce, Polite Protest, 49-51. 32 Andrew Ramsey, “School Board’s Beamish Boy Slays the Jabberwock,” Indianapolis Recorder, Sept. 4, Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century 27 Thornbrough, , 1965; Andrew Ramsey, “New Shortridge Plan Is Like Sweet Land of Liberty, 152-154 (quote 154); Sugrue, Decapitation as Headache Cure,” Indianapolis Recorder, 461-464. Oct. 2, 1965; Andrew Ramsey, “Board Vice-President Takes Issue with Voice from the Gallery,” Indianapolis 28 Andrew Ramsey, “‘Thanks’ for Your ‘Congratulations’,” Recorder, Sept. 25, 1965; Andrew Ramsey, “In Which Indianapolis Recorder, July 10, 1965; Andrew Ramsey, the Voice Replies to Mr. Richard Lugar,” Indianapolis “Shall We Have Voluntary Compliance with the Recorder, Oct. 9, 1965. Law?” Indianapolis Recorder, Apr. 4, 1964; Andrew Indianapolis Ramsey, “Integration Is a Tricky Word,” 33 Andrew Ramsey, “State and Local NAACP Prefer Legal Recorder , Nov. 26, 1960; Raeburn, “State Probes Race Action or Negotiations,” Indianapolis Recorder, Feb. 29, Complaint of Attucks French Teacher”; “‘Voice From 1964; Andrew Ramsey, “Integration is a Tricky Word,” Indianapolis Recorder the Gallery’ Silenced,” , Apr. 19, Indianapolis Recorder, Nov. 26, 1960; Andrew Ramsey, The 1973; Thornbrough, “Indianapolis Story,” 196; “The Benefits? Of Segregation,” Indianapolis Recorder, Annual: Shortridge High School Yearbook 74 (1968), June 10, 1961; Andrew Ramsey, “Boycotts and School 101; Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth

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Books,” Indianapolis Recorder, Mar. 21, 1964; Andrew 42 Andrew Ramsey, “It’s Not the Distance, It’s the Niggers,” Ramsey, “Integration—Shall We Do It Ourselves or Ask Indianapolis Recorder, Dec. 2, 1972; Pierce, Polite for Aid?” Indianapolis Recorder, May 27, 1967. Protest, 119-120; Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 484- 485; Thornbrough, “The Indianapolis Story,” 298-301; 34 Thornbrough,Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, Andrew Ramsey, “From Florida to Gary Race Holds the 154; “Dillin’s Decision Do [sic] in Part to Andrew Limelight,” Indianapolis Recorder, Mar. 18, 1972; Andrew Ramsey,” Indianapolis Recorder, Sept. 4, 1971; Marsh, Ramsey, “The Final Solution?” Indianapolis Recorder, “The Indianapolis Experience,” 897-993; Thornbrough, Mar. 25, 1972; Andrew Ramsey, “From Border to Border “The Indianapolis Story,” 197, 232-235; Pierce, Polite America Is Racist,” Indianapolis Recorder, Apr. 15, 1972. Protest, 51-53. 43 Andrew Ramsey, “A Shirt Is a Shirt, Is a Shirt, or Is It?” 35 Pierce, Polite Protest, 54; Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks Indianapolis Recorder, Mar. 8, 1969; Williams, “Ramsey in the Twentieth Century, 158; William E. Marsh and Made Me What I Am Today” Indianapolis Recorder, June Andrea K. Marsh, “Judicial Federalism in the Southern 23, 1973; Andrew Ramsey, “School Bells Toll out the District,” Indiana Law Review 37, no. 3 (2004), 637. Problems of American Education,” Indianapolis Recorder, Sept. 20, 1969; Andrew Ramsey, “Are We Failing Negro 36 Andrew Ramsey, “Attucks and ‘The Avenue’ Conjuring Youth?” Indianapolis Recorder, Apr. 14, 1962; Fairclough, Indianapolis Recorder up Ghosts,” , May 9, 1970. A Class of their Own, 398-400; Gael Graham, Young Activists: American High School Students in the Age of 37 Marsh, “The Indianapolis Experience,” 907-911; Andrew Protest (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, Ramsey, “Indianapolis Schools Hear from Uncle,” 2006), esp. chs. 2 and 3; “Indictments Illegal, Judge Indianapolis Recorder, May 25, 1968, 14; Andrew Rules,” Indianapolis Recorder, Apr. 12, 1969; Andrew Ramsey, “So, We also Have Teachers,” Indianapolis Ramsey, “Insidious Racism in Local Schools Turns off Recorder, Oct. 4, 1969; Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks Black Youths,” Indianapolis Recorder, Oct. 25, 1969; in the Twentieth Century, 155; Thornbrough, “The Andrew Ramsey, “The Racism Is Written in Indelible Indianapolis Story,” 239-243, 567-568fn27; “Attucks Ink,” Indianapolis Recorder, Nov. 22, 1969; Andrew Pupils Stage Mass Protest Walkout,” Indianapolis Ramsey, “Something Funny Happened to Last Week’s Recorder, Apr. 26, 1969. Article,” Indianapolis Recorder, June 10, 1972; Ramsey, 38 Marsh, “The Indianapolis Experience,” 912-915; Andrew “Our Schools Are in Trouble.” Ramsey “Comments from a Phase-Out,” Indianapolis 44 Andrew Ramsey, “Black Students Unions Subject to Recorder, Feb. 21, 1970; Thornbrough, “Indianapolis Questioning,” Indianapolis Recorder, Mar. 28, 1970. Story,” 262-277; “Protestors Rallying to Bar Closing of Indianapolis Recorder Crispus Attucks?” , Mar. 21, 1970; 45 Ramsey, “Something Funny Happened to Last Week’s Andrew Ramsey, “Defacto and Dejure Hairsplitting Delays Article.” School Integration,” Indianapolis Recorder, Dec. 5, 1970. 46 Weeks, “In Memoriam”; “‘Voice from the Gallery’ Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, 39 Thornbrough, Silenced”; Williams, “Ramsey Made Me What I Am 155-157; Thornbrough, “The Indianapolis Story,” 278- Today”; Bryant, “Mason Bryant Praises Ramsey”; Robert 288; Marsh, “The Indianapolis Experience,” 916-925. DeFrantz, “Dear Andrew,” Indianapolis Recorder, July 21, 1973. 40 Andrew Ramsey, “Court’s School Decision,” Indianapolis Recorder , Aug. 28, 1971; “Dillin’s Decision Do [sic] in 47 Marsh, “The Indianapolis Experience,” 932-933, Part to Andrew Ramsey.”. 947-961, 963, 979-992; Marsh and Marsh, “Judicial Federalism in the Southern District,” 631-637; Pierce, 41 Andrew Ramsey, “Integration Is the Only Way Says the Polite Protest, 51-55; Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks in NAACP,” Indianapolis Recorder, Apr. 22, 1972; Andrew the Twentieth Century, 156-160, 195-197; Caroline Ramsey, “School Board Election Is Most Important,” Hendrie, “In Indianapolis, Nashville, a New Era Indianapolis Recorder, Apr. 29, 1972; Andrew Ramsey, Dawns,” Education Week 17 (July 8, 1998), 8, 2; Erin “The School Board Election Dealing from the Bottom,” Nave, “Getting to the Roots of School Segregation: The Indianapolis Recorder, May 13, 1972; Andrew Ramsey, Challenges of Housing Remedies in Northern School “1896, Here We Come!” Indianapolis Recorder, July 29, Desegregation Litigation,” National Black Law Journal 1972; Thornbrough, “The Indianapolis Story,” 310-318. 21, no. 2 (2009), 191-192. 41 Andrew Ramsey, “Our Schools Are in Trouble,” Indianapolis Recorder, Nov. 11, 1972; Andrew Ramsey, “Local Public Schools Give Rotten Apples to Teachers,” Feb. 5, 1972.

48 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Investing in Segregation The Long Struggle for Racial Equity in the Cairo, Illinois, Public Schools

Kathryn Anne Schumaker

n 1969, Cairo, Illinois, was one of the most economically devastated cities in Illinois, and one of the most racially fraught places in the nation. Time magazine declared that there was “War in Little Egypt”—a nickname given to the Ifar southern region of Illinois. Time described fire-bombings, frequent gunfire, and “club-wielding” police officers as integral to the struggle over the implementation of civil rights reforms in the city five years after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Cairo appeared to be “headed for anarchy,” the story declared. Readers of the New York Times could follow the Cairo saga in a series of stories the newspaper ran during the summer of 1969, the most intense and violent period of the century-long conflict over the status of African Americans in Cairo. The Times termed the situation “guerilla warfare” and described how a group of white men formed a quasi-legal vigilante group called the White Hats to police the color line in Cairo. The White Hats included the Alexander County state’s attorney, the local sheriff, and many members of the all-white police force. The sheriff designated white private citizens as sheriff’s deputies, allowing them to openly carry their weapons with impunity. One member bragged to the Times, “I could get my dog deputized in this town.” While members of the White Hats claimed to be acting in the interest of law and order, African Americans suspected the organization of being responsible for a rash of fires at white-owned businesses that hired black workers or extended African Americans credit. The city was deeply divided and quickly becoming a national symbol of the enduring challenges of implementing civil rights reforms. In the midst of this crisis, the school board approved a plan to desegregate the city’s public schools.1 Suggesting that not every white person in Cairo supported the White Hats, the local chamber of commerce lamented to the Times, “Our image has been devastated, our economy crippled and our future, if there is one, is dark.” Members of the White Hats adhered bumper stickers to their cars and police cruisers that stated plainly, “Cairo: Love It or Leave It.” Leave is precisely what many residents did. The city’s population declined steadily between 1920 and 1970—especially between 1960 and 1970. By 1960, the city’s population had fallen more than a third from its 1920 peak of just over fifteen thousand residents. In the following decade, the population shrank another third—from 9,348 inhabitants in 1960 to

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6,277 in 1970. “White flight” was not solely responsible for this population loss, as whites and African Americans left in roughly equal proportions over the course of the decade. In 1960, the city was 62 percent white and 38 percent black; in 1970, these percentages were 62 percent and 37 percent, respectively.2 The long economic crisis that Cairo experienced is inextricable from the challenges of implementing civil rights reforms in the city—especially in its public schools. Due to its national infamy in the late 1960s, the city attracted the attention of social scientists and politicians who viewed it as representing the hardest challenges of implementing civil rights reforms throughout the nation: the fail- ings of federal policy, the neglect of the state of Illinois, and the oligarchic control of local politicians. Intertwined in the story of these troubled years is an enduring story of economic crisis, which came early to Cairo and hit especially hard. Most histories of urban economic crisis in the late twentieth century focus on large metropolitan areas, including Chicago, Detroit, and Oakland. But many African Americans settled in small cities like Cairo and rural areas outside of major metropolitan areas. Though the elements of the urban crisis often touched these places—deindustrialization, population loss, increasing poverty and joblessness rates—their stories also diverge. Whites could not simply avoid issues like school desegregation by moving to a suburb. In places like Cairo, the entire city faced the challenges of implementing civil rights reforms.3 Cairo is hardly representative of the struggles of the civil rights movement outside the South, but its exceptionalism in terms of the extent of economic devastation and violence provides a window into the interplay between the implementation of civil rights reforms and the economic fortunes of a city and its schools. By 1973, Cairo was the poorest small city in Illinois, with an unemployment rate that was double the national average. One-third of the residents of the county received public assistance, and the state considered half of its housing to be substandard. Economic crisis in Cairo cannot be disentangled from the stubborn opposition of many whites to rights reforms, and it provides a lens into the complicated ways that civil disorder, the rule of law, and the maintenance of civil society are important to a city’s reputation, and thus, its ability to be seen as a good or, as in this case, bad place to live and work. Ultimately, we must understand Cairo’s long economic crisis in order to make sense of its civil rights history.4 In Cairo, the schools were only one of many battlefields in the ongoing struggle of African Americans to achieve equal treatment and racial justice. Fights over employment, for representation in city government, and for justice in policing were also important. The schools provide a singular view of the way in which the refusal of white elites to compromise on matters of racial reform irreparably dam- aged institutions that were central to community life. An analysis of the schools shows the ways in which the failure of white elite leadership to accommodate civil rights change harmed the city’s most vulnerable residents: its children. First by

50 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY KATHRYN ANNE SCHUMAKER refusing to desegregate the city’s school system and then by declining federal funds to help manage the process of desegregation while tacitly approving the establishment of an all-white private school, the school board, mayor, and city council bled the schools dry of students and funds. Enrollments in public schools plummeted, and rather than support academic excellence, the private white school operated primarily to maintain traditions of segregation. The corollary to the white elite’s investment in white supremacy proved to be a dis- Charles Dickens (1812-1870). investment in public education.5 CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

“A place without one single quality…to commend it.” Cairo earned its reputation as a city rife with economic and political troubles soon after its founding. Its position at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers appealed to speculators who grabbed land during the mid-nineteenth century on the promise that the city would become the gateway to the West. But regular spring flooding and the regional dominance of St. Louis and Chicago ensured that Cairo remained a small settlement until the Civil War. After passing through on an American tour, Charles Dickens wrote that Cairo was “a dismal swamp, on which half-built houses rot away…the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it.” The city was “a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it.”6 The Illinois legislature’s decision to make Cairo the southern terminus of the Illinois Central in 1852 briefly spurred population growth and, by 1860, the city’s population had increased tenfold. Though the city failed to grow as rapidly as its boosters hoped it would with the arrival of the railroad, the population grew steadily even as the river trade declined. But the declining importance of river transportation took its toll on the city’s economy. By 1908, the tonnage shipped on the Mississippi was one-fourth the amount shipped just twenty years earlier. Barge companies folded and the Singer sewing machine factory closed during the 1910s. Efforts to attract a government armor factory and an army training camp during World War I failed. A thriving vice economy kept the city afloat during these years of declining population and job loss. Taverns and prostitution were a vital compo- nent of the city’s economy from the Civil War until Prohibition. Between 1910 and 1920, Cairo received the largest proportion of its municipal revenue from saloon licenses, wholesale liquor licenses, and wholesale beer licenses. In the first half of the twentieth century, Cairo’s vice industry formed the largest and most reliable source of income for the local government.7

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Cairo, Illinois, 1861. FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

By 1920, when the city’s population peaked, African Americans made up one-third of the city’s total population of fifteen thousand. The population increase coincided with a further deterioration of Cairo’s economy in the 1920s. Prohibition pushed the vice economy underground and starved the city of tax dollars. During the Depression, Cairo’s welfare rolls swelled—forty percent of the city’s inhabitants received public relief in 1935, whereas the average figure for Illinois as a whole was only fourteen percent. After World War II, the federal government identified Cairo as a place with problems of “critical unemployment.”8 Racial segregation in the Cairo schools developed in the nineteenth century in defiance of state law. Members of the Illinois General Assembly voted to outlaw school segregation in 1874. The measure grew out of the debates over the new state constitution of 1870, which removed all previous references to color in estab- lishing the protections of state citizenship. The new constitution also included a provision for free public education for all Illinois children. Whether or not this new constitution included a prohibition on separate schools was initially unclear. When the Illinois Supreme Court took up the question in a case against the school district of Danvers, a small town northeast of Springfield that erected a separate schoolhouse for four black children, the court ruled that the directors “have no power to make class distinctions…[or] discriminate between scholars on account of their color, race or social position.” But the court’s primary finding was that building separate schools was a wasteful use of taxpayer funds, leaving open a question of whether segregated schools in districts with large white and black populations might be constitutional. In response to this ambiguity in the law, the assembly passed an “Act to protect colored children in their rights to attend public school” in an attempt to settle the question at last.9

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In Cairo, situated on the state’s southernmost tip, segregation in schools existed from the founding of the first public schools in the area. Efforts to desegregate the public schools began as early as the 1880s and continued sporadically through the 1960s. In the late nineteenth century, Cairo had separate elementary schools for black and white children, though the high school was whites-only. Local African Americans were dissatisfied with this state of affairs and marched on the local high school in protest. As recorded by William Henry Perrin in A History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties (1883), “The motley proces- sions were headed by the most venerable old gray headed bucks and wenches, and tapered down to the most infantile, unwashed, bow-legged picaninnies; and they all said, ‘I recken we’uns wants to gradiate as well as white trash.’” Perrin concluded, “It all resulted in nothing more serious than a great annoyance and inter- ruption to the schools.” Despite their inability to challenge the existence of segregation in local schools due to the intransigence of the white authorities, African Americans in Cairo rejected the legitimacy of the color line and their children’s exclusion from the high school.10 The schools in Cairo remained segregated well into the twentieth century. Black teachers were nevertheless unafraid to confront disparities in pay between white and black teachers in city schools during the mid-1940s. Teacher-pay equalization lawsuits were part of a strategy by the NAACP to leverage the “separate but equal” clause of Plessy v. Ferguson. For segregated schools to be constitutionally protected under the Fourteenth Amendment, all else had to be equal to white schools. The most concrete way to identify and challenge inequities between white and black schools was through discrepancies in teacher salaries. In 1945, with the assistance of State Representative Corneal Davis from Chicago, African American teachers sued the Cairo school district. Thurgood Marshall argued the case before the local court, as he did for many other teacher-pay equalization suits in the South. In the court’s 1946 decision in Negro City Teachers Association of Cairo v. Nickell, the federal district court ruled that pay for black teachers had to be equal to pay for white teachers with similar experience. But after the lawsuit’s success, the leader of the movement to bring the lawsuit, a black teacher named Hattie Kendrick, lost her teaching job.11 Events during the 1940s held the promise that all Illinois schools might be desegregated. In 1949, State Representative Charles Jenkins, a black Republican from Chicago, announced his intention to “wipe out Jim Crowism in Illinois schools.” He wrote a provision into the school aid bill that prohibited segregated districts from receiving any of the $112 million in state funding provided to local schools. This action compelled most of the state’s segregated districts into at least token integration, lest they lose their state education funds.12 Cairo was one of the last cities in Illinois to implement desegregation in the early 1950s, prompting a wave of resistance from white segregationists. At first,

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the Cairo school board attempted to halt the withholding of state funds by claiming that children had always been free to attend the school of their choice and that segregation was merely incidental. When the NAACP and black parents attempted to challenge this claim by filing applications for eighty-five children to attend white schools, the school board stalled the student transfers while white citizens took matters into their own hands. The night before the children were scheduled to begin classes at the white school, three burning crosses were erected in the city’s black neighborhood. A few days later, someone threw a firebomb into the home of a prominent black dentist, Dr. Urbane Bass, and another black physician, Dr. J. C. Wallace, had a shot fired into his home. An NAACP official found three sticks of dynamite attached to a partially-burned fuse in front of his auto parts store. Thirty people were eventually arrested in relation to the violence—twenty-one whites and nine African Americans. The desegregation- ists arrested were charged with “conspiring to endanger the lives of children” by forcing black students to attend white schools, among them were several local NAACP officials, a podiatrist, a preacher, and a white lawyer. Police arrested other white men in connection to the bombing of Dr. Bass’s home. A grand jury failed to indict any of those arrested, and as was the custom in Cairo, no one was punished for racially-motivated crimes.13

Desegregation Policy as Fiscal Pragmatism After the failed attempt to desegregate the schools in the early 1950s, the issue reemerged a decade later. During the mid-1960s, cities throughout southern Illinois began the process of closing their segregated black schools. Cairo was one of the last to comply; it followed closures of all-black schools in nearby Carbondale, Mounds, and Mound City. Cairo’s school district continued to operate a dual system, even though it formally maintained the policy of open enrollment that it instituted in the early 1950s in order to avoid the denial of state funds. With open enrollment, token integration existed at all levels of public schooling. A few black children attended the predominately white elementary, junior high, and high schools. Nevertheless, the school board did not make any effort to close the segregated African-American schools, and so the vast majority of black students in Cairo continued to be educated at schools with entirely black student populations.14 Cairo’s schools were a clear example of de jure segregation. They were not neighborhood schools, and Cairo was not a rigidly segregated city. Black and white children were bused separately to school. Black drivers picked up black children and delivered them to school, and the same was true for white children. This busing scheme meant that many routes had to be covered twice by the segregated buses. Preston Ewing Jr., the leader of the local NAACP, testified about continued segregation in Cairo at a hearing held by the Illinois Department of Public Instruction

54 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY KATHRYN ANNE SCHUMAKER in August 1966. According to Ewing, though black parents understood that they could choose to send their children to the predominately white schools, there were a number of reasons they continued to send their children to the all-black schools. Black students at the predominately white schools were often not allowed to participate fully in extracurricular activities, and were subject to discrimination at school. No black teachers worked at the predominately white schools, and Ewing testified that the textbooks did not represent the African American experience.15 Ultimately, the issue of school desegregation came down to a matter of fiscal pragmatism. There were far too few students to support separate elementary, junior high, and high schools for black and white children in Cairo. Operating a dual system was expensive; with a shrinking population, the operation of two high schools and junior high schools in a town of seven thousand people made little fiscal sense. Duplicating busing routes in order to carry black and white children to separate schools weighed heavily on the district’s bare-bones budget. After operating at a deficit for several years and under pressure to desegregate from the Illinois Department of Instruction, the Cairo Board of Education relented during the summer of 1966 and passed a desegregation plan. In order to improve existing structures, the school board embarked on a $1.3 million plan to close many of the city’s schools and improve the remaining newly desegregated schools. The school board’s plan reduced the educational footprint from ten school buildings into just three, including a combined junior-senior high school. An addition to the new school housing grades seven through twelve together provided space for a gymnasium, cafeteria and band room, in addition to new classrooms. A former junior high school was overhauled and used as an elementary school. Six hundred thousand dollars in bonds and a loan from the Illinois Building Commission paid for the improvements. The plan began with the high schools, which were consolidated during the 1967-1968 school year.16 School desegregation in Cairo was modeled on the “Princeton Plan”—named after the desegregation program implemented by the Princeton, New Jersey, public school system in the 1940s. The Princeton Plan called for merging segregated schools through school pairings. Districts would reorganize schools to serve fewer grades and more children. But the Princeton Plan was a misnomer for what occurred in Cairo and other small cities in southern Illinois, especially at the high school level. Once the school board voted to desegregate the system, there simply were not enough students in Cairo to justify operating two separate schools as called for by the Princeton Plan. Instead, the board combined the schools, and the previously all-black schools were closed. Along with school closures came layoffs of teachers and administrators, which disproportionately affected black teachers at the schools slated for closure. Their jobs disappeared as black students were transferred to the white schools. While the implementation of the Princeton Plan should have avoided mass school closures and layoffs of black teachers and staff, this was not the case in Cairo and other small cities in the region.17

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Although the school board conducted its discussions of plans to desegregate with relatively little fanfare, the implementation of the plan was far more complicated and difficult. The summer before the high school consolidation was to take place, the city experienced intense and violent civil disorders. On July 15, 1967, Robert L. Hunt, a nine- teen-year-old black soldier arrested and charged with being AWOL from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, died at the city jail. The police claimed that Hunt’s death was a suicide by hanging, though skeptical community members suspected foul play. The city failed to complete an autopsy and had Hunt embalmed immediately, stoking rumors that police officers had beaten Hunt and then staged the suicide to cover up the incident. Floretta Simelton, a Cairo resident and civil rights activist, recalled, “They say he hung his Robert L. Hunt (1948-1967). self with a t-shirt, which we knew wasn’t so. We went and COURTESY OF SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY- CARBONDALE viewed his body at the funeral home, and you could see where he had been beaten, seriously beaten.”18 A day after Hunt died, the city erupted in four days of civil disorder, and the unrest was not quelled until the governor called in the National Guard and the mayor imposed an 8 p.m. curfew. African-American rioters threw rocks and bottles and some firebombed a warehouse, a lumberyard and several other stores. Occasionally, rioters exchanged gunfire with whites who sought to protect their businesses. On July 19, Governor Otto Kerner called in the Illinois National Guard, which set up a blockade of the segregated Pyramid Courts housing project and monitored anyone who left or entered. Miraculously, aside from a white woman who claimed that a black teenaged girl had stabbed her in the arm, no injuries were reported.19 The Cairo protests took place during the summer of 1967, when rioting broke out in cities across the nation, notably Atlanta, Tampa, Cincinnati, and Newark. During the four days of unrest in Cairo, newspapers reported riots in several northern New Jersey cities, Minneapolis, and Detroit. Despite its small size, Cairo was not an outlier in its experience of civil disorder during 1967. Of the civil disorders documented by the Kerner Commission, 41 percent occurred in cities with populations under one hundred thousand, and half of those took place in cities with fewer than fifty thousand inhabitants.20 Whites in Cairo immediately responded to the 1967 riots by forming a militant, all-white vigilante organization, styling themselves the “White Hats.” The organizers included some of the most prominent white citizens of Cairo and many of its political leaders: Reverend Larry Potts, who was the pastor of the Cairo Baptist Church; a wealthy businessman named Tom Madra; future Cairo

56 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY KATHRYN ANNE SCHUMAKER mayor Allen Moss; and State’s Attorney Peyton Berbling. Local law enforcement embraced the organization, giving it a quasi-legal status. The sheriff deputized many members, and they equipped themselves with radios, police dogs, and shotguns. Members of the organization boasted that they had a membership of six hundred and could summon a force of 320 armed white men within fifteen minutes if necessary.21 A white Catholic priest, Father Gerald Montroy, brought national attention to the situation when he told a St. Louis newspaper in 1969 that the White Hats terrorized African Americans in Cairo. Montroy’s assertion attracted the attention of the Illinois Council of Churches and other congregations throughout southern Illinois, who sent delegations of ministers to investigate his claims. Some of the ministers were present during a two-hour long intense gun battle between blacks in Pyramid Courts and whites stationed on the nearby railroad tracks, and they left the situation confirming Father Montroy’s accusations. Members of the White Hats did not deny the militant, aggressive nature of their organization. Indeed, Tom Madra cited it as the organization’s strength. Criticizing the restraint demonstrated by National Guard members, Madra explained to a reporter, “Our main deterrent value is that we are untrained and dangerous on the streets.…We’re going to shoot them. I don’t care if it’s Father Montroy or the Pope.” According to Madra, the White Hats would treat the interfering priests and ministers the same way they treated black protesters.22 Some African Americans responded to the formation of the White Hats by organizing the United Front, which had a similarly militant philosophy. Charles Koen, a young African-American native of Cairo, headed up the organization, which had a three-pronged approach to Cairo’s crisis: eradicating racism, deliv- ering economic justice, and securing self-defense for the black community. The symbol that the United Front chose to represent the organization was a pistol laying atop a bible. Koen preached that organizations spiritual, economic, and self-defense aims were all essential to its mission.23 Things were predictably tense when the school year began in September 1967. Immediately, the new combined high school faced problems. Following a boycott by black players who refused to board the bus for the early season game, the football team was defeated 26-0 by nearby Anna-Jonesboro. The source of the dispute was the election of the cheerleading squad by the student body, which had not chosen any black cheerleaders. Not long afterward, a group of anonymous “concerned parents” signed a petition asking the school administration for more rigorous standards of discipline for students, citing a disorderly atmosphere at the schools. The anonymous group concluded, “The climate for learning leaves much to be desired.”24 With racial tensions high both inside and outside the schools, in the spring of 1968, the Cairo Public Schools faced massive administrative turnover. The district’s superintendent, Harold Mescher, and assistant superintendent both resigned. So

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Bullet holes in a Cairo fire truck. COURTESY OF SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY-CARBONDALE

did the principal of Cairo Junior High School and two members of the board of education. Teachers also quit—so many that the outgoing superintendent vowed to spend the remaining months of his tenure recruiting replacements. The local teachers union petitioned the Board of Education to reject Mescher’s resignation, stat- ing, “We feel that our ability to perform in a troubled situation is due in large part to the able leadership of our Superintendent.” More teachers resigned the following year. The secretary of Cairo High School abruptly quit and moved away in the middle of the year. Administrative and staff turnover made planning for the future difficult as the district’s leadership constantly changed. Grace Duff, the Alexander County superintendent, testified to a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hearing in Cairo in 1972 that “This rapid turnover works against sound planning, direction and long range goals—in school finance as well as educational programs.”25 Students also fled the system, which compounded the problems of the public schools. Though Cairo Schools faced a number of challenges during these years, the most intractable problem was that of funding. The system lost ninety students during the first year of desegregation, 1967-1968. Since the state and federal governments allocated funding on a per-pupil basis, the loss of students meant that the school district would also lose seventy-two thousand dollars from the state and federal governments that year alone. Cairo’s tax base was already one of the lowest in the state of Illinois, and local funding made up more than half of each Illinois school district’s revenue. Voters had not approved a local property tax increase since 1961. Even more troubling, in September 1968, the board’s treasurer predicted that the school district would have a deficit of three hundred sixty thousand dollars by June 1969.26

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The board scrambled to find sources of relief from the impending financial crisis. Members proposed a new tax levy for the city and a plan to apply for state funds to turn the unused former African American high school building into a school for special education students. This would help the district secure federal funds that could help stabilize it during the fiscal crisis. The federal government seemed increasingly willing to provide federal dollars to help school districts comply with new federal desegregation mandates, and the Cairo school board considered using this to its advantage. Officials in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the Justice Department believed that since the direc- tive to desegregate came from the federal government, it seemed only fair that funds would come along with it. Congress passed the Emergency School Aid Act in 1970, which provided additional funds to help school districts desegregate. The act made seventy-five million dollars available to districts, but Cairo did not qualify for these funds, since desegregation was not court-ordered. The fiscal crisis hurt in other ways: the board rejected a plan by local civil rights leaders to implement a tutoring program to aid struggling students because the group requested use of the Cairo Junior High School building, claiming that the program would add to district expenses.27 Cairo’s position shows the ways in which federal desegregation policies modeled on the South often put Northern school districts at a distinct disadvantage. Morris Osborne, the director of the Equal Educational Opportunities office of the federal Department of Education for the Midwest Region, sought to inter- vene on behalf of Cairo and other Illinois districts that desegregated voluntarily and were therefore left out of the allotment of federal funds. Osborne expressed his frustration to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “School districts like Cairo, Evanston, all of these voluntary districts…[t]hey ought to receive first priority. To me this is a discrimination in the law itself.” But the federal government was in the midst of a roiling debate over busing, and the national conversation remained squarely focused on the desegregation of Southern schools.28 In the midst of rapid staff turnover and an increasing budget crisis, the local NAACP continued to push for equitable treatment for black students in the Cairo Public Schools. After the white-dominated school board ignored their petitions, concerned parents managed to convince the state superintendent of schools, Ray Page, to hold another hearing in Cairo in the spring of 1969. Page reviewed the textbooks used by social studies teachers at Cairo public schools, and he ordered the district to adopt texts that “show the role and contributions of ethnic groups.” But Page ruled against the NAACP on two other complaints. First, he disagreed with the NAACP’s demand that the school deny the Egyptian Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution the opportunity to present an award to a Cairo High School student. Ewing and the NAACP charged that the DAR was a racially discriminatory organization and that the award was limited to white

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students, but Page claimed that the evidence for this charge was insufficient. Page also determined that the Cairo High School administration was within its rights to remove students who gave the clenched-fist Black Power salute during the play- ing of the national anthem at a basketball game the previous January.29 While district officials had eliminated the dual school system on the high school level, they did not implement substantive reforms to reduce general racial discrimination in the schools, and the NAACP accused the school board of ignoring the persistence of discrimination. In the fall of 1969, the civil rights organization presented a comprehensive list of grievances against the Cairo Public Schools. In the newly desegregated Cairo High School, black students were excluded from some classes when white teachers objected to their presence. The organizers of the yearbook discriminated against black students in the photographs chosen for inclusion. Police officers patrolled the schools and subjected black students to random questioning with the consent of administrators. School officials allowed the DAR to give awards at school events, but local black organizations were not permitted to do the same. The NAACP also accused the board president of reprimanding an elementary school teacher for teaching a lesson on Martin Luther King Jr., and attempting to integrate black history into her curriculum.30 Compounding the district’s financial woes driven by population loss, a new private school opened and lured students and parents away from the public school system. A group of white residents founded Camelot, an all-white private school, which opened in the fall of 1969. The school operated in a building that Tom Madra and other segregationists had purchased cheaply at auction from the Cairo Public Schools, which they then gifted to the Camelot school board. The Southern Baptist preacher Larry Potts, who also helped organize the White Hats, led the effort to form Camelot. Potts explained the provenance of the school’s name: “The legendary site of King Arthur’s Court was a place where justice, honor and truth reigned supreme.… It remains for the young to strive for perfection and Camelot will live again…in an unlikely place, in a place blessed by nature but marred by man.” Camelot’s founders modeled their school on segregated private schools that were established in response to public school desegregation in the South.31 The IRS could deny tax-exempt status to private schools that discriminated on the basis of race, though the administration of Camelot found ways to avoid being accused of breaking the law. Camelot adopted and promoted a nondiscrimination policy, even though many of the most prominent members of the White Hats served on its board. The school managed to operate on an all-white basis through intimidation. Locals knew of the racist views of school leaders, especially Potts. In 1968, the Baptist minister had beaten a seventy-three-year-old black man named Marshall Morris to death with a baseball bat in his apartment. Potts claimed that he

60 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY KATHRYN ANNE SCHUMAKER discovered Morris attempting to rape his wife, and—despite the fact that Potts was both younger and larger than Morris—Morris had overpowered him and Potts had to resort to deadly force. A coroner’s jury found that no crime had been committed, and the case never went to trial. To local African Americans, Potts remained a symbol Bumper sticker from the late 1960s. of racial injustice and the complicity of COURTESY OF SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY-CARBONDALE local law enforcement.32 When the United States Commission on Civil Rights pressed Potts about whether or not Camelot refused to enroll black students, he told the Commission, “We have a completely open door policy. There is no effort to exclude anyone. We would accept Negroes if they applied.” When the commission interviewed Tom Madra, also a White Hat and member of the Camelot board of directors, Madra argued that the intimidation that kept blacks away from Camelot came from the United Front, not from the White Hats. Each side blamed the other for its practices of intimidation, though it is unlikely that many black families could afford the tuition, which cost three hundred forty dollars a year, or would have been willing to send their children to a school whose board included vir- ulent white supremacists. Students at Camelot reported to the United States Civil Rights Commission that teachers made derogatory remarks about African Americans during class, calling black children “animals” and “sons of bitches.” In a private interview, a white student who had transferred to Camelot from Cairo High School told the commission “the Camelot teachers kept telling us we couldn’t fail. They told us the colored were like a bunch of animals. Larry Potts gave a speech and said we were competing with blacks. One winter day the classroom was cold and a kid sitting with an overcoat on said he was going back to the public school. And a woman teacher said to him, ‘You can go back if you want with those black sons of bitches’.” Regardless of Potts’s professed dedication to the principle of nondiscrimination, testimony from students at Camelot revealed the extent to which white supremacy was part of the school’s very mission.33

Racial Crisis and Fiscal Crisis The establishment of a private school for whites and subsequent transfers of white students worsened the financial situation of the schools. Between September 1968 and January 1969, the Cairo public school enrollment declined by fifty- four students. When Camelot opened in September 1969 enrollment fell by another five hundred students. Of that number, three hundred enrolled in Camelot. By January 1970, the schools had lost nearly a third of their students.

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With the substantial decrease in pupils, the state overpaid the Cairo school district by nearly $250,000 in the 1969-1970 school year, as appropriations for each school were based on the previous year’s enrollment. When the state identified the overpayment, however, the district had already spent the money. The Cairo school district made an agreement with the state to repay the funds over a three- year period, depriving its already meager budget of much-needed cash.34 The school board was also at fault for depriving the school system of funds. The Federal government had programs that could have brought external sources of revenue to Cairo public schools. But when those funds finally became available, the school board rejected federal money for fear that strings might be attached, preferring to rely on deeply felt principles of local control rather than the practical necessity of an infusion of cash. Dr. Morris Osborne, director of the Equal Educational Opportunities regional office for the United States Office of Education, testified at the United States Commission on Civil Rights hearing that Cairo public schools were in desperate need of funding from all sources. He expressed frustration and dismay that the district had not made an effort to secure state and federal funding for their schools, and said that fears about federal and state interference in local school issues were at the heart of the district’s reluctance to pursue external funding. Testimony from Alexander County Superintendent Grace Duff confirmed Osborne’s assertion. “The board of education didn’t accept this money because accepting Federal money meant too many Federal guidelines, and, in other words, they would hold the strings and they would call the moves, so to speak,” Duff said. Though they had been aware of the impending financial crisis for years, the white majority on the school board expressed a tremendous amount of suspicion toward the federal and state governments—a tendency that only thrust the school district into further debt and deprived students of necessary resources.35 Funds available through Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would have allowed the Cairo School District to hire a financial adviser to help solve the district’s financial dilemma. Osborne testified that the district was “going to get R. L. Johns and Kern Alexander…two of the best finance men in the United States. And the board turned it down.” Osborne testified that a meeting of community members showed support for the Title IV funds among parents, but this popular support was ignored by the school board. Osborne told the commission that the rationale that school board members provided for rejecting the money was that it would “open old wounds”—presumably those inflicted by racial conflict. Dr. Michael Bakalis, the Illinois State Superintendent of Schools, testified, “In my opinion, no locality under the guise of local control or anything else has the right to deny any child what is guaranteed to him constitutionally by the State, and that is a high quality education. But those issues are not resolved yet.” Bakalis echoed Osborne’s frustrations with

62 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY KATHRYN ANNE SCHUMAKER the school board’s reluctance to accept external help for the funding crisis, but he bowed to the principle of localism. He concluded, “I don’t want to leave this Commission with the impression that somehow I’m saying local control is a bad thing and should be done away with.”36 The actions of the school board and other white elites show a profound ambivalence over the quality of education that children in Cairo received. While the white majority on the school board, which had no black members until 1968, preferred to let children suffer in inadequate schools rather than accept relief for fears they might have had to acquiesce to demands for accommodation to federal standards, the community also rejected proposals to increase funding through taxes. The vast majority of funding for Cairo’s public schools came from local property taxes, and voters denied a bond referendum in an effort to come up with additional funds. Community members seemed not to trust anyone—not the federal and state governments, educational experts, or each other—to aid them in repairing such a fundamental community institution.37 The budget crisis affected the schools in every way imaginable, devastating both the teaching force and the physical infrastructure of the buildings. By early 1969, the school district was no longer able to pay its gas and electricity bills and had to request that the utility company temporarily defer its payments. The school district could not afford to pay for even regular maintenance of the school buildings. In order to save funds, the new principal of Cairo High School can- celled all athletic events for the 1969-1970 school year. Though Preston Ewing Jr., appeared before the school board in April 1969 asking that the board once again review the NAACP’s list of complaints about continuing racial discrimination in the schools, those concerns were secondary to the board’s new primary task: keeping the system financially afloat. To pay for the most urgent bills, the district borrowed against the local property tax receipts that would be paid in the summer. The necessity of laying off teachers for the upcoming school year was bal- anced by the high number of resignations from the district teaching staff.38

The Triumph of Local Control A report on the racial conflict in Cairo prepared by Illinois Lieutenant Governor Paul Simon reflected the polarization of the community and the power that cyni- cism held over both African Americans and whites. The report described Cairo as a place where, despite its small size, a chasm between whites and blacks pre- vented the two sides from understanding and coming to terms with one another. The report blamed “a clergyman”—likely Father Montroy—for airing inflated “charges which have been given widespread publicity.” The report acknowledged that both blacks and whites mistrusted the reporting of the local newspaper, the Cairo Evening Citizen, but concluded, “The depth of hostility in the Negro community is much greater than in the white community.”39

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Was Cairo as racially divided as the reports claimed? The city takes up a mere nine square miles of land, though by the late 1960s, it appeared to be comprised of two entirely separate worlds, one white and one black. Yet not every white parent pulled their child out of Cairo’s public school system, even though Camelot offered scholarships to help parents who could not afford the school’s tuition. By

Paul Simon (1928-2003). 1973, after the peak of racial violence, approximately COURTESY OF THE U.S. CONGRESS four hundred of the 1335 public school students in Cairo were white—30 percent of the total enrollment. While the various commission reports produced on Cairo declared that “both groups are caught in a web of emotional rhetoric and have divorced themselves from reality and are therefore unable to move the city toward economic, political, or social progress,” evidence belies another reality. Although the most radical groups on either side of the civil rights struggle captured the megaphone, there was no single “community” or representative that spoke for all whites or African Americans. Life went on in Cairo even in the midst of a “race war.” Despite the high drama of pitched civil rights battles, public institutions like the school district continued to operate, though they were impaired in their ability to adequately anticipate and address the challenges of running a functional public education system.40 As Commissioner Mitchell expressed, “If you want to call education a civil right, which this Commission feels it is…if the community, the voting community, chooses to degrade the quality of its school system, it appears to have a right to do so.” Despite the interventions of the federal and state governments, schools were still fundamentally local institutions. Local communities managed, staffed, and were the primary funders of public education. Boards of education were subject to the will of the electorate, and as is exceptionally clear in the case of Cairo, few school administrators were able or willing to accept the task of pushing for civil rights reforms that were unpopular with such a vocal minority. Other suc- cesses of the civil rights movement may have made these reforms seem to be natural consequences of a national turn toward antidiscrimination, but implementing them proved to be especially difficult where powerful elites protested any change at all. The federal government’s reliance on a Southern model of school segregation in considering ways to ameliorate the rocky process of implementing racial change failed the Cairo schools. Federal programs also failed to take into account that even in the case of voluntary desegregation, districts might choose to reject funds, dooming the implementation of “successful” desegregation before it even began.41 Preston Ewing Jr., argued that Cairo’s policy of racial segregation hurt both black and white children. Ewing told representatives from the Illinois Department of Instruction, “Every day that these doors of this school or any school in Cairo

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opens, this school district is guilty of perpetrating a crime against the children of this community, not only black but also white.” The refusal of the school board to accept desegregation funds in the late 1960s and the creation of Camelot meant poorer schools for all the students in the public system. Black and white children continued to go to school in Cairo after the tumultuous years of the late 1960s and early 1970s, though over the decades, there were far fewer of them. The fail- ings of local governance to orchestrate compromise on reforms and effectively manage the emerging financial crisis paralyzed the schools. The price that every- one in Cairo paid for the white elite’s refusal to accommodate civil rights reforms was the deterioration of a central community institution, the schools.42

1 “War in Little Egypt,” Time 94, Issue 13 (Sept. 26, University of Missouri-Columbia, 1996), 30-39. On 1969); “Cairo, Ill., Divided By Racial Conflict; City Fears Chicago’s regional dominance, see William Cronon, Future,” New York Times, June 23, 1969. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). 2 “Cairo, Ill., Divided By Racial Conflict; City Fears Future,” New York Times, June 23, 1969; Bureau of the 7 Herman Lantz, A Community in Search of Itself: A Case Census, Fourteenth Census of the U.S., vol. 3: Population, History of Cairo, Illinois (Carbondale: Southern Illinois 1920 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, University Press, 1972), 41-53, 68, 79, 81. 1922), 262; Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Population: 1960, vol. 1, Characteristics of the Population, 8 Lantz, Community in Search of Itself, 52-54, 59. pt. 15 (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Black Metropolis: Office, 1963), 116; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of 9 St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Population: 1970, vol. 1, Characteristics of the Population, A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: pt. 15 (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1945), 50; Roger D. Office, 1973), 214. Bridges, “Equality Deferred: Civil Rights for Illinois Blacks, 1865-1885,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical 3 On the urban crisis, see Arnold Hirsch, Making the Society 74 (Summer 1981), 96-97. Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960; A History of Alexander, Union and Thomas Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and 10 William Henry Perrin, Pulaski Counties Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton (Chicago: O. L. Baskin & Co., 1883), 194. University Press, 1996); and Robert O. Self, American 11 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896); Interview with Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland Corneal Davis by Horace Q. Waggoner, p. 138, Illinois (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). General Assembly Oral History Project, Volume II, 4 Paul Good, Cairo, Illinois: Racism at Floodtide (Washington, University of Illinois at Springfield Special Collections, Negro City Teachers’ D.C.: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1973), 5. Springfield; Declaratory Judgment, Association v. Nickell, Civil Action No. 968 (1946), Part 5 Preston Ewing, Jr., Let My People Go: Cairo, Illinois, 1967- 3, Series B, Reel 7, NAACP Papers (hereafter NAACP 1973 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, Papers). On the teacher pay equalization suits, see 1996); Kerry Pimblott, Soul Power: The Black Church and Katherine Mellon Charron, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of the Black Power Movement in Cairo, Illinois (Ph.D. diss., Septima Clark (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012). Press, 2009), 151-67.

6 Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, 12 George Tagge, “Bar School Aid to Any Backing Race Volume II (London: Chapman and Hall, 1842), 109- Exclusion,” Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1949; “Few Illinois 110; Peter Hays, Way Down in Egypt Land: Conflict and Schools Have Segregation,” Chicago Tribune, May 18, 1954. Community in Cairo, Illinois, 1850-1930 (Ph.D. diss.,

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13 Harry S. Ashmore, The Negro and the Schools(Chapel or Hardcore Bigots?” Chicago Daily Defender, May 7, Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954); “Crosses 1969; Illinois Advisory Committee to the United States Burned in Illinois,” New York Times, Jan. 29, 1952; “21 Commission on Civil Rights, A Decade of Waiting in Pupils Transfer in Cairo Bias Case,” New York Times, Mar. Cairo (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2, 1952; “Jury Finds no Basis for Trial in Racial Fuss,” 1975), 5. Chicago Tribune, Feb. 23, 1952. 22 “‘White Hats’ Terrorize Blacks in Cairo: Priest,” Chicago 14 “Southern Illinois Prep Football Season Begins Friday,” Daily Defender, Mar. 27, 1969; “20 Clergymen Back Southern Illinoisan (Carbondale), Sept. 14, 1967. Ewing Priest Blasting Illinois ‘Vigilantes,’” The Washington Post, estimated that forty-two black students and three Mar. 28, 1969; “Cairo, Ill., Divided by Racial Conflict; hundred seventy white students attended Cairo High City Fears Future,” The New York Times, June 22, 1969; School and twenty-three black students and 162 white A Decade of Waiting in Cairo, 6. Stories about the White students attended Cairo Junior High School at the end Hats appeared in almost every major national newspaper. of the 1965-1966 school year, the last academic year See “Ogilvie Sends 70 State Cops to Cairo Duty,” before desegregation at the elementary and junior high Chicago Tribune, June 20, 1969; “Troopers Replace Cairo levels. Testimony of Preston Ewing, Jr., “Report of the Vigilantes,” The Washington Post, June 20, 1969; “Cairo, Hearing Held by the Department of Instruction, State Ill., Divided by Racial Conflict; City Fears Future,” The of Illinois, at Cairo High School, Cairo, Illinois, Aug. New York Times, June 22, 1969; “Self-Styled Cops,” The 23, 1966,” Folder 3, Box 292, American Civil Liberties Wall Street Journal, Oct. 9, 1969. Union Papers (hereafter ACLU)—Illinois Division, Special Collections Research Center, Regenstein Library, 23 Charles Koen, United Front Philosophy (Cairo, Il.: United University of Chicago (hereafter UCSC). Front, 1970).

15 Testimony of Preston Ewing, Jr., “Report of the 24 “Anna-Jonesboro Tops Cairo; Negroes Boycott Pilot Team,” Hearing…,” ACLU, 34-36. Southern Illinoisan (Carbondale), Sept. 17, 1967; Minutes of the Cairo Board of Education, Apr. 18, 1968, CUSD. 16 Testimony of Harold Mescher, City Superintendent of Schools, “Report of the Hearing…,” 65-68, 86; “Cairo 25 School Board Minutes, Apr. 18, 1968, Sept. 16, 1968, Issues Bonds; Schools to Integrate,” Southern Illinoisan and Nov. 18, 1968, CUSD; Testimony of Dr. Grace (Carbondale), Aug. 4, 1965; Minutes, Cairo Board of Duff, Superintendent, Alexander County Educational Education, Sept. 16, 1968, Cairo Unified School District Service Region, United States Commission on Civil Administration Building, Cairo, IL (hereafter CUSD). Rights, Hearing, Held in Cairo, Illinois, March 23-25, 1972 (Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 17 June Shagaloff, “A Review of Public School Desegregation 1974), 398 (hereafter USCCR). in the North and West,” Journal of Educational Sociology 36 (Feb. 1963), 292-96; “Cairo Race Trouble Sets 26 School Board Minutes, June 17, 1968. State money Foundation for Constructive Work,” Southern Illinoisan accounted for 37-38 percent of public school (Carbondale), Sept. 24, 1962. funds, while federal funds made up just 5 or 6 percent. Testimony of Michael Bakalis, Illinois State 18 “Alert Guards after Racial Riot in Cairo,” Chicago Superintendent of Schools, USCCR, 142-44. School Tribune, Jul. 18, 1967; “Poverty Aide Shot in Day of Board Minutes, Sept. 16, 1968, CUSD. Violence,” The New York Times, Jul. 18, 1967; Ewing, 10. 27 School Board Minutes, Sept. 16, Nov. 18, 1968, CUSD. 19 “Curfew Ordered in Cairo Unrest,” Chicago Daily Defender, Jul. 20, 1967; “Guardsmen Patrol in Cairo, Ill., 28 USCCR, 141. On the ongoing controversy over schools After Three Nights of Violence,” The New York Times, Jul. and busing in the early 1970s, see James T. Patterson, 20, 1967. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 20 United States Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of 2001); Gary Orfield and Susan Eaton, eds., Dismantling the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of York: Bantam, 1968), 115; Ron Powers, Far From Home: Education (New York: New Press, 1996). Life and Loss in Two American Towns (New York: Random House, 1991), 9. 29 “Textbook Change Ordered in Cairo Schools,” Southern Illinoisan, Aug. 13, 1969. 21 Powers, Far From Home, 16-17; Michael P. Seng, “The Cairo Experience: Civil Rights Litigation in a Racial 30 “Complaints of Racial Discrimination as Practiced by Powder Keg,” Oregon Law Review 285 (1982), 1; “‘White the Cairo, Illinois Public Schools During the 1969-1970 Hats’ Terrorize Blacks in Cairo: Priest,” Chicago Daily School Year,” Aug. 15, 1969, School Board Minutes, Aug. Defender, Mar. 27, 1969; “White Hats: Good Guys 18, 1969, CUSD.

66 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY KATHRYN ANNE SCHUMAKER

31 Testimony of Tom Madra, USCCR, 97. Madra and three 35 USCCR, 141-42, 340, 128. other white men from Cairo purchased the building for four thousand four hundred dollars. Adjusted for 36 Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided for inflation, the price would be approximately twenty-eight the allocation of federal funds to school districts in thousand dollars in 2013. Good, Cairo, Illinois, 39. the process of school desegregation. USCCR, “Title Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator, www. IV and School Desegregation: A Study of a Neglected bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm (accessed Oct. 3, Federal Program,” (Washington, DC: USCCR, 1973), 1; 2014). Good, Cairo, Illinois, 37; Matthew Lassiter, The USCCR, 149, 150-51. Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South Southern Illinoisan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 37 “2nd Negro Named to Cairo Board,” , Cairo, Illinois 23-24, 33-34; Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and Apr. 21, 1969; Good, , 38. the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, N.J.: 38 Letter, John Evans to Cairo Public Utility Commission, Princeton University Press, 2005), 169-79. Jan. 22, 1969, School Board Minutes, Jan. 21, 1969, 32 USCCR, 100-101; Concerned Community Coalition of Mar. 17, Apr. 21, May 19, 1969, CUSD. Bloomington-Normal, On the Battlefield: Cairo, Illinois 39 USCCR, Illinois Advisory Committee, Cairo, Illinois: (Bloomington, Il.: Concerned Community Coalition of A Symbol of Racial Polarization; A Report (Washington, Bloomington-Normal, 1970), 5. D.C.: United States Commission on Civil Rights, 33 J. Anthony Lukas, “Camelot in Cairo: For Whites Only,” 1973), 7. New York Times, Sept. 21, 1969; USCCR, 96 and 99; 40 USCCR, 396; Good, Cairo, Illinois, 38. Good, Cairo, Illinois, 37. The cost of tuition at Camelot during the 1972-1973 school year was three hundred forty 41 Good, Cairo, Illinois, 146. dollars per student, which when adjusted for inflation, is roughly equivalent to eighteen hundred dollars in 2013. 42 Testimony of Preston Ewing Jr., “Report of the Hearing…,” Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator, www.bls. p. 9, Folder 3, Box 292, ACLU Papers, UCSC. gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm (accessed Oct. 3, 2014).

34 USCCR, 339; Letter, Mason to Ogilvie, Mar. 17, 1971, USCCR, 403; USCCR, 145-46.

FALL 2014 67 Collection Essay Twentieth-Century African American Collections at The Filson

n May 2012, The Filson Historical Society hosted a three-day conference entitled, “National Issues, Local Struggles: The Civil Rights Movement in the Ohio Valley and Beyond.” Along with the event, Special Collections staff, Iin collaboration with Curator Jim Holmberg and Director Mark Wetherington, prepared an exhibit entitled, “20th Century African American Collections at The Filson” that provided an overview of some of The Filson’s African American research materials drawn from the manuscript, photograph, library, and museum collections. These items reflected a wide spectrum of twentieth century African American life—family, home, work, education, military service, religious and social organizations, racial prejudice and violence, and the Civil Rights Movement. The exhibit underscored the experiences of women, men, and children in the long struggle against segregation and the barriers to economic, social, and political opportunity, a struggle that continues today. This collections essay, based in part on the exhibit, seeks to highlight The Filson’s holdings on the important roles played by African Americans in the Ohio Valley region during the twentieth century.

Careers and Professional Life Several collections of personal papers document the professional lives of African American men and women in the region. Samuel M. Plato (1882-1957) was a prominent African American architect and builder who not only made important contributions to the African American community in Louisville, but also achieved recognition for his designs nationwide. The Plato Family Papers include some of his business correspondence, as well as personal letters from his family members in Alabama. Additionally, the Samuel Plato Photograph Collection contains images of Plato, his first wife Nettie Lusby Plato (1879-1924), his second wife Elnora Davis Plato (1891-1975), and other family members and friends. Also included are construction photos of many of his architectural works: post offices around the country, defense housing projects, residences, churches, sub- divisions, and theaters.

68 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY JENNIFER COLE

Mary Lusby Reed, Nettie Lusby Plato, Stella Lusby, and Martha (Mattie) Lusby McElroy (not ordered), Lusby Family Photograph Collection. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The Margaret Smith (1897-1986) Papers document the professional life and social activities of an African American woman of Louisville from the 1920s through her death in 1986. The collection is mainly composed of personal correspondence with the family who employed her, the Heyburns, as well as diaries. These diaries describe Smith’s daily routine, particularly work for the Heyburn family, recreational activities, weather, dental problems, her general health, and her attendance at Zion Baptist Church. The Matthews Family Papers and the William B. Matthews Miscellaneous Collection document the life of educator William B. Matthews (1864-1940), the principal of Louisville’s Central Colored High School from 1912 until his retirement in 1934. The collections consist of letters, pamphlets, essays, along with advertising and fund raising cards, centering on the career, civic engage- ment, and personal interests of Matthews and his family. The letters concern African American school affairs, in particular, Central High School, as well as civic, church, and YMCA activities. The collections give an overview of African American aspirations and involvement in the Louisville area in the early years of the twentieth century. Faith Pillow (1954-2003) was a singer and composer born and raised in Louisville. In the 1970s, after a series of singing engagements in Louisville, she moved to Chicago and began her career as a singer/songwriter, which took her to

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Louisville Central High School students at “Club La Conga” dance, February 25, 1944, Al Blunk Photograph Collection. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Los Angeles and the Netherlands. The Faith Pillow Papers document the career of this talented woman, and include sheet music, lyric sheets, recordings, photographs, promotional materials, periodical clippings, and a journal related to Pillow’s career. Dr. Jesse Bennett Bell (1904-1998), a native of Louisiana, received his medical degree from Meharry Medical College in Nashville in 1931 and, after moving to Louisville, devoted his career to public health, working with Waverly Hills Sanitarium and Louisville’s Health Department. He served as medical director of the Red Cross Hospital from 1942 to 1946, and opened a part-time private practice in Louisville. His collection consists of correspondence with numerous boards and organizations to which he belonged over a long medical career in Louisville, along with many awards and recognitions. Bell’s photograph collection depicts events in his life and includes persons of national importance, such as Roy Wilkins and Muhammad Ali. The Filson has additional collections relating to medicine and African Americans, including the J. Scott Lux Red Cross Hospital Scrapbooks which document Louisville’s Red Cross hospital, founded by a group of African American physicians in 1899 to serve Louisville’s African American population. The scrapbooks include reproductions of photographs, news articles, and blue- prints, along with transcripts of taped interviews. Additional materials relating to African American medical care include architectural plans of segregated facilities in the D. X. Murphy and Bro., Architects, Hospital Facilities Collection.

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Civil Rights The Civil Rights Movement is best documented outside of the manuscript portion of The Filson’s collection, notably in the George Beury Photograph Collection, the Mary Cobb Collection, and the Free Press of Louisville newspaper. Photographs taken by Dr. George V. Beury document, in part, the racial unrest in Louisville following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968. The Kentucky National Guard was called out regarding possible distur- bances in the wake of this tragic event. Beury, the pastor of the West Louisville United Church of Christ on 41st Street, took these photos while driving to a colleague’s home on Dumesnil Street. Mary Cobb, a Louisville artist most well known for her accomplishments in the field of portraiture, began her career in the 1960s as a courtroom artist. Her collection includes original courtroom sketches for the Louisville Black Six Trials during which James Cortez, Manfred Reid, Samuel Hawkins, Robert Sims, Ruth Bryant, and Walter Cosby were acquitted of plotting civil disturbance in Louisville’s West End. Editor Gary Hume described the Free Press of Louisville in its first issue, dated May 14, 1970, this way: “A Free Press is one that reports news without regard to social or economic status. Its first responsibility is to the People, all the People—regardless of race, color, creed, or national origin….” The “Freep (Free) Publishing Company,” a commune living at 1438 South First Street, put out the

Image taken by Dr. George V. Beury in April 1968 showing the presence of the National Guard during racial unrest in Louisville following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. George Beury Photograph Collection. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Mary Cobb’s court room sketch of Louisville’s Black Six Trial, 1970, Mary Cobb Collection. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

issues once every two weeks and included articles, interviews, reviews, photographs, hand-drawn art, classifieds, and cartoons, providing an “ideological voice of the New Left.” The paper became a member of Liberation News Service and Underground Press Syndicate, and ran from May 1970 to at least June 1971.1 The Louisville Free Press focused on social problems and agitated for legislative change through articles on draft counseling and protests, the women’s liberation movement, environmentalism, the gay rights movement, and the Black civil rights movement. Articles focused on issues facing the local African American population, such as the trial of Louisville’s Black Six, the ongoing legal issues of editor Netra Hume and her partner, Sylvester Phillips (an interracial couple), and housing conditions; they also reported on national events. As an underground paper, the Free Press of Louisville provides a counter-cultural perspective on events in Louisville and the nation in the early 1970s, and is an important resource for gleaning a different view on Civil Rights issues than Free Press of Louisville newspaper one might find in the major newspa- cover, June 1970. pers of the day. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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War Service African American service during time of war is also represented in The Filson’s collections. The Johnson Family Papers include a letter and image of James Williams Banks of Scott County, who was in Company D of the 801st Infantry Regiment. He had been a driver for Dr. W. H. Coffman before enlisting in the army. Banks wrote a letter to the Coffman family on July 22, 1918 from Camp Zachary Taylor, enclosing his image. After noting that he is well, and inquiring about the family’s health, Banks writes, “I like the camp life so far, we have plenty to eat and well-cooked.” The Lusby Family Photo collection includes several images of World War I African American soldiers, as well as one of Elizabeth Smith, a Red Cross nurse. From World War II, the Julian G. Brooks letters consist of correspondence sent to Sgt. Julian Brooks while he served in the 1888th Engr. Aviation Battalion in the China-Burma-India Theater. His immediate family writes from Chicago, and other relatives write from Washington, DC, Selma and Prairie, Alabama, and Henderson and London, Kentucky. The direct family correspondents write candidly about day-to-day life and general current James Banks, Company D, 801st Infantry events of the time. Other family and friends stateside Regiment, at Camp Zachary Taylor, write of attending universities, night life, and ask Johnson-Payne-Coffman Family questions of Brooks. Brooks also receives letters from Photograph Collection. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY friends serving in the military around the world.

Education and Recreation As in the Julian G. Brooks Papers, education, family life, and social activities are clearly documented in nearly all of the above collections. Samuel Plato’s role as head of his extended family is revealed through his correspondence and papers, as is his funding of his relatives’ education. Margaret Smith’s diaries record her social life and church attendance. The Matthews Family Papers document African American education in Louisville in the early twentieth century. Other collections at The Filson have family, social life, and education as their central focus. The Lusby-Reed Family Papers include correspondence, postcards, holiday greetings, and birth, marriage, and death records for this Louisville family. The family’s extensive photograph collection (most of which is labeled) documents their life on Grand Avenue in Louisville, along with education, sports, and other recreation activities. Records of the Kentucky Council on Churches document this ecumenical organization, which includes several African American churches and denominations.

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State Normal School Class of 1902. Architect Samuel Plato, back row, 2nd from left. Samuel Plato Photograph Collection. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The Filson’s Rare Pamphlet collection sheds additional light on recreational activities. Two handbooks, Ladies’ Book of the U. B. F.: Initiation Ceremony, Ritual, and Lectures and Ladies’ Book of the U. B. F.: Constitution, General Laws, By-Laws, and Rules of Order Installation, Funeral Ceremonies, both compiled by Order of National Grand Lodge and assembled in Indianapolis, Indiana, July 1, 1880, document the workings of the “Sisters of the Mysterious Ten,” the women’s auxiliary of the United Brothers of Friendship, a Black benevolent association in Louisville. These two books, along with a ceremonial sword in the museum collection, belonged to Dinnie Thompson, a former slave at the Farmington plantation outside of Louisville. Later in her life she worked as a laundress or domestic for private families and the Neighborhood House, managed to own her own home, and remained single throughout her life. These collections of manuscripts, photographs, newspapers, architectural records, and printed material, along with the many that have not been described in this brief essay, all provide a glimpse into the various facets of life—vocation, education, recreation—for African Americans in the Ohio Valley region in the twentieth century. The Filson welcomes all researchers to explore their rich depths.

74 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY JENNIFER COLE

A Call to Action Documentation of the pioneer, antebellum, and Civil War era have been the meat and bones of The Filson’s collection since its founding in 1884. Over the last fifteen years, The Filson’s curators and collections development committee have recognized the need to preserve more recent history and have actively sought and acquired materials to bring the collections on the Ohio Valley region into and through the twentieth century. Twentieth century material now accounts for over half of the physical collection. In preparing materials for the 2012 exhibit and in composing this collections essay, The Filson’s lack of materials documenting the African American experience, not only in Louisville but throughout the Ohio Valley region, is apparent. The collection contains more eighteenth- and nineteenth-century information on enslaved African Americans, through the voices and records of their owners, than it does on the twentieth-century African American individuals, families, businesses, and organizations in the Ohio Valley region. While holdings on African Americans have increased in recent decades and do share significant stories, documenting the lives of minorities was not a priority during the bulk of The Filson’s existence. In keeping with the theme of growth brought about by The Filson’s current campus expansion, The Filson must actively embrace and indeed assert- ively seek to provide a more complete picture of the region’s history by preserving the contributions of the African American community. As The Filson affirms its commitment to the preservation of the records of African Americans in the Ohio Valley region, please consider assisting by sharing your own family’s records, or information about other preservation and documentation possibilities. Jennifer Cole Associate Curator

1 The Filson Historical Society holds issues from Vol. 1, No. 1 (May 1970) through Volume 2, No. 3 (April/May 1971). Two issues within this span, vol. 1, nos. 9 and 14, are absent. A review of other holding institutions based on a search in WorldCat (www.worldcat.org) revealed that two additional issues have been preserved: vol. 2, no. 4 (May 1971) and vol. 2, no. 5 (June 1971) at the University of Louisville’s Archives and Special Collections.

FALL 2014 75 Annette and E. Lucy Braun Papers at the Cincinnati Museum Center

“ e preserve as historical sites, the places where battles were fought, or ruins of a fortification, or the old log cabin of pioneer settler. Is it not more important, more fitting, that we preserve something of theW forest through which they came? For cabins can be restored, fortifications can be rebuilt, but forests once gone are gone forever.” E. Lucy Braun “Save Kentucky’s Finest Primeval Forest” (Box 27 folder 4)

Determined, no-nonsense, authoritative and passionate are all words used to describe sisters Annette and Lucy Braun. In an era when such traits were still frowned upon in women the Brauns forged ahead in the scientific world with an unapologetic tenacity. Colleagues could only be pleased and impressed, and perhaps a bit jealous, of the rigor apparent in all of their work. This stark dedication to study defines the Annette and E. Lucy Braun Papers [Mss 1064]. Consisting mainly of professional correspondence, research notes and files from their lives’ work, one is at pains to find anything extraneous within the twenty-eight boxes of materials. The writings of Lucy and Annette Braun stand out for their lucidity and forthright nature. Obviously highly intelligent and verbally gifted, their letters are filled with details of their cataloging of various species and their subsequent research. Annette (1884-1978) and E. Lucy Braun (1889-1971) (she preferred to drop the E. in her name, for Emma) were the children of teachers in a household that valued education and the love of nature above all else. Though unusual for their time, to friends and family it was doubtlessly unsurprising when Annette became the first woman to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati in 1911 and Lucy the second in 1914. Annette’s career was in entomology, with a focus on microlepidoptera (moths and butterflies), and Lucy’s in botany. They traveled throughout North America collecting specimen and recording their observations in notes that can be found within the collection. The sisters lived together and were always near each other, each one’s work complementing the other’s. Both Annette and Lucy were quite open and shared information with their colleagues. Judging from the ample correspondence in this collection it appears that this generosity was reciprocal. Both sisters corresponded with researchers

76 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY CHRISTINE ENGELS

Annette and Lucy Braun. Photograph Collection. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER all over the world and thankfully kept drafts of many of the letters that they wrote alongside their responses. They were in close contact with curators at the Smithsonian and multiple research centers and universities and seemed to revel in the exchange of information. A delightful find in this collection are two short letters to Annette from Vladimir Nabakov, the famous author who was also an entomologist, in 1947 when he was an unofficial curator of lepidoptery (the study of moths and butterflies) at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Sadly there are no drafts of her letters to him included. As anyone with siblings knows, there is both good and bad associated with sharing the spotlight and living so closely together. Though both sisters were talented and achieved a status in their fields previously unknown to women, Lucy’s fame was brighter than that of her sister. Much of this came from her activism on behalf of forest conservation, an important precursor to the modern environmental movement. She was a nationally recognized expert for forest ecology, and was instrumental in the preservation of many of Kentucky and Ohio’s forests, including the Lynx Prairie Preserve in Adams County, currently maintained by the Cincinnati Museum Center. She was the editor of Wildflowers and a president of the Ohio Academy of Science, among many other duties and honors. A dedicated instructor and researcher, Lucy only retired from the University of Cincinnati in 1948 to complete The Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America (1950), a book that still stands out for its breadth and wealth of information. Once that was completed she studied and mapped out the vascular plants in Ohio, which resulted in The Woody Plants of Ohio (1961) and Monocotyledoneae: Cat-tails to Orchids (1967).

FALL 2014 77 ANNETTE AND E. LUCY BRAUN PAPERS AT THE CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

Letters from Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Curator of Lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, to Annette Braun. Annette and E. Lucy Braun Papers. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

Though Annette’s demeanor was less domineering than her sister’s, she was no less accomplished. In addition to being a full professor at the University of Cincinnati, Annette was also a president of the Ohio Entomological Society and for a time a secretary at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History. She wrote many articles throughout her career and published four books, Evolution of the Color Pattern in the Microlepidopterous Genus Lithocolletis (1914), Elachistidae of North America (1948), The Genus Bacculatrix in America North of Mexico (1972), and Tischeriidae of America North of Mexico (1972). She was quite famous for her detailed drawings, and in fact many letters from her correspondents contain just as lovely drawings placed within their letters. The precise technical language used by Annette and Lucy Braun belied the deep passion they had for knowledge and their love of exploration and discovery. No one could set down so many words on any topic without it being pivotal to their lives. To get a sense of who these women were and the values they held deep- est one only needs to read their writings. From rough drafts to finished products, in letters to colleagues and friends, there is a drive to know more, to document it and share the knowledge. Annette and Lucy Braun’s love of the natural world is best displayed by the legacy they left, which can be found in its most raw form in their manuscript collection. Christine Engels Archives Manager

78 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY CHRISTINE ENGELS

Annette Braun. Photograph Collection. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

FALL 2014 79 Review Essay Voices of the People Studies of Louisville Desegregation Dionne Danns

came to history because of the stories my high school and college history teachers told. They knew the fascinating backgrounds of the historical char- acters, and I was intrigued by the choices these individuals made and chal- Ilenges they faced and overcame. As a Ph.D. student, I wanted to tell stories, but mentors warned me that stand alone stories can become fodder for those who choose to put their own interpretations on those stories. While the stories remain essential to history, without careful analysis readers can easily misinter- pret the lessons or understanding the historian tries to convey. The stories I imag- ined I would once tell drew me to oral history. Many historians once and sometimes still view this methodology with suspicion. Participants’ faulty memories and interpretations of the past could surely cloud any study. Richard White, in Remembering Ahanagran, warned that “history is the enemy of memory.” Yet he acknowledged that memory is a guide if one chooses to embark on “dense and tangled terrain” in “the jungle of the past.” Despite careful and eloquent warn- ings, historians are more likely to use and accept oral history as an essential tool for understanding the past and recognizing the voices of those less likely to leave traditional records. Scholars such as Paul Thompson, Jan Vansina, Studs Terkel, and others forged important steps and provided important guidance for scholars who would later utilize oral history and tradition. In the last twenty to thirty years, oral history has moved from a place of suspicion to a more readily accepted source for historical studies. More recently, scholars have moved from simply accommodating oral history into their studies of desegregation to having oral history at the center of their work. These two books are among the most recent studies of this sort.1 Tracey E. K’Meyer’s From Brown to Meredith uses oral history interviews from four different projects. K’Meyer became interested in this research as she followed the responses to the 2007 Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education case. She latches on to the increasingly popular “long movement” perspective historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall introduced. According to K’Meyer, her study captures the various school desegregation plans and changes that evolved over the years. Her long movement viewpoint enables her to reveal the growth and development of the plans, as well as the often forgotten support for school desegregation

80 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY DIONNE DANNS in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition, her use of oral history interviews brings a local people approach that foregrounds the perspectives of community actors. She pur- posely chooses to allow local people to speak for themselves, as slightly edited interview transcripts stand alone, book- ended by careful analysis at the beginning and end of each chapter. K’Meyer’s study highlights the many stages of school desegregation in Louisville. She captures each of these stages in the four chapters between the introduction and conclusion. The first chapter focuses on school desegregation from 1954 to 1971 when the city initiated a voluntary desegregation plan that involved the input of various community members and groups. The involvement of these groups effectively sty- Tracy E. K’Meyer. From Brown to Meredith: The Long Struggle for School Desegregation in mied mass resistance. The plan had prob- Louisville, Kentucky, 1954-2007. Chapel Hill: lems, however, because it allowed both University of North Carolina Press, 2013. 240 pp. ISBN: 9781469607085 (cloth), 39.95. blacks and whites to transfer to schools with students predominantly of their race. Despite plan limitations, Louisville’s early desegregation looked progressive compared to other southern cities. The narratives for this chapter cover the process, problems, and the experiences of students, teachers, and administrators. The chapter reviews participants’ different types of memories based on how they became involved with the process. Many administrators had positive memories, while students remembered the struggles they faced because of racism. The second chapter covers a far more turbulent time. As whites moved to the Jefferson County, re-segregation took place in Louisville. Following federal pressure, a lawsuit, and a countywide desegregation plan, more contentious anti- desegregation protests ensued endangering the lives of some participants. This era of desegregation involved the busing of both blacks and whites—though blacks disproportionally so—and led to mass resistance rivaling Boston. The narratives K’Meyer highlights in this section include the voices of the white opposition and the supporters of busing, and show the impact of desegregation on the experience of teachers and students. Although interviews reveal eventual disappointment with busing and negative experiences, they also, according to K’Meyer, reveal the positives of desegregation and serve as a counter-narrative to traditional tales of black disillusionment.

FALL 2014 81 VOICES OF THE PEOPLE

Chapter three examines the various reforms to Louisville school desegregation plans that eventually led to the Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education Supreme Court decision. While much of the public historical memory focuses on the busing difficulties of the mid-1970s, the district adjusted the desegregation plan in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, prior to the court cases that eventually led to the plan’s dismantlement. The narratives focus on the reforms of 1984 and 1991, as well as the court challenges beginning in 1998. By highlighting these forgotten revisions and the important community debates they sparked, K’Meyer attempts to de-center the popular desegregation narrative focused on federal and court actions. The fourth chapter differs somewhat from the previous three because K’Meyer offers less contextual information for the narratives. She instead allows the narratives to speak directly to critiques of the school board, negative and positive reflections of school desegregation, and its impact on the community. In seeking to evaluate the effect of school desegregation, K’Meyer argues that the narratives of the participants do not follow the traditional social science analyses focusing on statistics and test scores. Rather, they discuss the loss to the black community as well as the resources gained. K’Meyer concludes that the oral history interviews contradict the popular narrative that school desegregation represented a failed experiment. For her, the interviews show the efforts of individuals to help implement desegregation in Jefferson County, keep children safe, and defend and negotiate desegregation. She believes that the pro-desegregation narrative balances the history of school desegregation and, as Howard Zinn notes, can energize readers to do something. K’Meyer hopes that rather than simply claiming desegregation as a failure, Americans should learn from the lessons and highlight the actions of those who fought to support and protect desegregation. Oral histories provide an avenue to combat the largely negative public memory of school desegregation. Although K’Meyer offers careful analysis at the beginning and end of each chapter, her commentary might have been more effective—and would engage readers more fully—if woven throughout the book. While readers will find it refreshing to see a historian pushing methodological boundaries, the ability of the new methods to become more centered in the scholarship depends on the success of such inno- vations. Oral history has certainly pushed its way from the margins and enhanced postwar scholarship. The histories dependent and centered on oral history offer an opportunity to expand the boundaries of whose voices receive a hearing in the historical record. K’Meyer certainly gives us an extended view of Louisville’s desegregation. Scholars have long recognized African Americans’ prolonged road to freedom without calling it a long movement, but K’Meyer effectively uses the concept to dispel the one-sided public memory of Louisville’s school desegregation. Yet K’Meyer

82 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY DIONNE DANNS fails to recognize the scholarship that already complicates the view of desegregation as a failure. In many instances, the policy remains a failure despite its benefits for many students, largely because American society has continually rejected integration. School policies and court decisions continued to privileged whites and structured desegregation as a benefit to whites. The best teachers and students often left black schools, or school officials closed many such or spruced them up to accommodate whites. Once repealed, desegregation efforts have left blacks in segregated schools but, as one narrator notes, without community. Policies created to maintain racial hierarchy in society have continually undermined the education of masses of black people. And the reversal of positive steps in the right direction has led to further neglect of black communities. Despite these negative policy results, K’Meyer rightfully points to the positives: improved academics, narrowing the achievement gap, and the expansion of the black middle class.2 Sarah Garland’s Divided We Fail, while covering the same city and some of the same events, differs in substantive ways than K’Meyer’s book. As a journalist, Garland writes beautiful prose more attractive to a general readership that incorpo- rates oral history narratives, historical context, and analysis in a seamless approach. Like K’Meyer, Garland portrays local people—activists, students, lawyers, school teachers, and school officials—as actors in a twist of fate. She focuses on black activists, students, and community members unhappy with the racial quotas that limited black participation at their beloved Central High School. In response, the black community initiated a lawsuit to loosen the quota that eventually led to the destruction the entire school desegregation in Jefferson County—though that was not the intent of all the activists. Garland notes that the African Americans who brought Hampton v. Jefferson County were not the first to launch a legal fight against desegregation; instead, “they were just the first African Americans to do so” (x). While the Meredith case brought national attention to the whites who sought to dismantle school desegregation in one of the country’s most desegregated communities, Garland wants readers to know those who made Meredith possible. She opens her story by focusing on the dissatisfaction of black Sarah Garland. Divided We Fall: The Story of an students who received letters of rejection African American Community that Ended the Era of School Desegregation. Boston: Beacon Press, from Central High School. Dionne Hopson 2013. 256 pp. ISBN: 97880807001776 and Ja’Mekia Stoner both wanted to attend (cloth), 26.95.

FALL 2014 83 VOICES OF THE PEOPLE

Central, formerly a beloved school within the black community but transformed into a magnet school in order to draw whites to the city. The school had a difficult time keeping white students and because of a quota set by the district, black students more often received rejection letters or were transferred from the school when the number of white students fell. The policy of limiting black students angered some black activists and eventually prompted them to sue the school district. Garland captures the historic development of the Louisville black community and their love of Central. The NAACP, the vanguard organization for school desegregation, did not view the segregated Central High School in the same way as many local blacks. The organization filed the suit that led to the creation of a merged Jefferson County school district, which desegregated only after much protest. But for many black residents, desegregation transformed Central so that the school, once the beacon of the black community, “no longer felt like ‘our school’” (95). As the school district adjusted its desegregation plan through the years, the school became increasingly difficult for black students to attend. Once viewed with pride by many in the black community, Central became a focal point for a movement to end the favored position of whites in the school and increase the number of blacks attended. Garland went to school in Louisville and participated in school desegregation, and K’Meyer now lives in Louisville. Their interest in Louisville is personal, sparked in part by the 2007 Meredith v. Jefferson County Supreme Court case decision. Yet despite their personal connections, both writers have produced complex interpretations of the black and white responses to desegregation in Louisville and Jefferson County. Both blacks and whites stood in support of and opposition to school desegregation. Opposition groups, whether white or black, viewed desegregation as a loss of community. Those who supported desegregation, particularly within the black community, believed it brought important, tangible, and significant benefits. However, those benefits did not come without sacrifices. What do these studies reveal about school desegregation that we did not already know? K’Meyer offers a long view of school desegregation in Louisville through its many ebbs and turns. From peaceful desegregation in the 1950s to opposition protests in the 1970s, and from adjustments to the plans in the 1990s to the court cases that eventually led to the dismantlement of desegregation, readers enjoy a history of the process through the voices of the participants. Garland, focusing on the black community, highlights the rationale behind the decision of some black activists and parents to challenge one aspect of the latest iteration of the desegregation plan as it affected one school. While the plaintiffs had no intention of overturning the system, they hired an ambitious lawyer, Teddy Gordon, who dreamed of bringing the case before the Supreme Court. Although in over his head, Gordon managed successfully

84 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY DIONNE DANNS to overturn school desegregation despite having attended desegregated schools and placing his children in such schools. Both authors, despite differing styles and personal connections, bring to life fascinating oral history-inspired case studies that enrich understanding of desegregation, especially differing black and white experiences with desegregation. Still, readers are left to wonder where the nation should go from here. Will Americans regret how quickly they discarded desegregation in favor of high stakes testing and choice options that have yet to narrow the achievement gap between whites and blacks or prepare all citizens for global participation?

1 Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family’s Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 4; Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).

2 James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); David S. Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); R. Scott Baker, Paradoxes of Desegregation: African American Struggle for Educational Equity in Charleston, South Carolina, 1926-1972 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006).

FALL 2014 85 Book Reviews

Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper South Jaime Amanda Martinez

he Confederate States of America used the and the state and national government endorsed Tmechanism of impressments to coerce slaves this policy. By 1864, both levels of government to support the army in the war with the United cooperated in calling on slaveholders to supply States. This copiously documented monograph 20,000 workers to support the war. Virginia looks at impressments in the Upper South, in the and North Carolina played unique roles in states of Virginia and North Carolina. As Jaime slave impressments, and that’s why Martinez Amanda Martinez writes in Confederate Slave uses them as case studies. Virginia slaveholders Impressment in the Upper South, slaveholders responded to calls for slave laborers and local “temporarily surrendered control over portions governments hired slaves to work in various of their slave populations to state authorities, departments in the Confederate army, including military officials, and finally the national govern- medical units and railroad construction. North ment” (2). Martinez considers it an irony that Carolina’s pro-impressment governor also used slaveholders who had left the Union because of state power, including the militia, to requisi- its meddling with slavery accepted Confederate tion slave laborers. These states, therefore, seem power to require them to send slaves to build for- to be excellent choices when evaluating coerced tifications in order to save their new nation from laborers and public and private responses to the defeat. Slaveholders would never enthusiastically impressment system. The Confederate govern- accept impressments; however, they forced state ment ultimately made the Conscript Bureau and national leaders to consider their interests as responsible for impressments, but their endorse- they requisitioned slaves. The author also shows ment did not resolve tensions inherent in a pol- that enslaved Africans did not merely succumb to icy whereby the government seized the assets of being instruments of the Confederacy; they fre- private citizens to achieve national goals, even quently escaped, especially as they came close to though Confederate success in the war would Union military camps. have resulted in the preservation of slavery. Martinez uses Virginia and North Carolina The author approaches impressments methodi- to develop this dramatic narrative about impress- cally, describing the call for slave laborers in 1861. ments. She carefully documents that military Brigadier General John Bankhead Magruder led leaders used ad hoc methods developed in the the way when he asked slaveholders for laborers field in response to the exigency of the war. The to build-up defenses along the James River. He Confederate army needed manpower to move hoped that slaveholders would cooperate freely, but heavy equipment, cut down trees, dig trenches would seize the slaves if he had to. By September to fortify military camps and safeguard southern of that year General Magruder had actually begun cities from Union encroachment. Impressment to seize slave and free laborers to build fortifica- was the answer to the critical need for workers, tions. Actions as his forced state governments to

86 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY BOOK REVIEWS draft policies for impressments, in order to mini- mize conflicts with slaveholders who feared the loss of their property would have made it difficult for them to harvest their crops. Once impressments commenced, not only were free blacks threatened by it, Native Americans were also forced into service as laborers, despite their protest. As Martinez states, “State and Confederate officers in Virginia and North Carolina routinely appropriated the labor of Native American men, whom state laws classified as ‘free colored men’” (21). The Confederacy later targeted inmates in penitentiaries, which did not annoy slaveholders who had mixed feelings about releasing their slaves to the army. Slave laborers served in many roles while in the field. They sometimes dug trenches and built fortifications to protect key Confederate areas. This meant that enslaved workers did the back- breaking work of swinging heavy picks and shov- els as they cleared away dirt to make ditches. They Jaime Amanda Martinez. Confederate Slave Im- also cut down trees, transported supplies, and pressment in the Upper South. Chapel Hill: Univer- sity of North Carolina Press, 2013. 248 pp. ISBN: built bridges. This dangerous work frequently 9781469610740 (cloth), $39.95. aroused concerns among slaveholders who feared the shape their slaves would be in when they came home, should they survive the dangerous military comfort in the notion that the Confederate gov- theatre. It is no wonder, as Martinez explains, ernment was seizing slaves to save slavery, oth- that “Some slaveholders [began]…hiring slaves to ers remained concerned about a government that meet their requisitions rather than sending their undermined their ability to harvest their crops. own workers” (71). Slaveholders felt compelled to An underlying theme in this book makes it clear balance their own interests with that of the gov- that the Union’s response to slaves in Confederate ernment for the duration of the war. camps was appropriate; Congress passed the Overall, this work provides additional ways Conscription Acts to deny seceded states access to to view the Confederacy in the Civil War. For slave labor. Readers who are looking for evidence one thing, Southern leaders seceded from the of black Americans exercising personal agency on Union because they had become disgruntled the Confederate side will clearly see that Union over federal policy that interfered with slavery. Contraband Camps resulted from black people From the way Martinez treats impressments, it is running away to find refuge in those camps. obvious that the Confederate government itself The well-written introduction will likely became centralized as the war progressed, and hook readers into this book right from the national interests sometimes trumped local inter- beginning. The prose is clear and the argu- ests. While some slaveholders might have taken ment is compelling. The monograph sheds

FALL 2014 87 BOOK REVIEWS

light on the Confederacy, but it is not a trea- Jefferson Davis considered arming blacks late tise about the lost cause; it furthers our under- in the war, President Lincoln actually did it standing of how intertwined slavery was to the and, ultimately, his decision turned the tide North and South during the war. Both gov- leading to Union victory. ernments used African Americans to further Stephen Middleton their war aims. Where Confederate President Mississippi State University

George Keats of Kentucky A Life Lawrence M. Crutcher

ver the past decade scholars have shown grandparents. Orphaned in their teens, the Oincreased interest in transatlantic cul- Keats children came under the guardianship of ture. More recently, several authors, including Richard Abbey. Scholars have criticized Abbey Lawrence Crutcher, have explored Kentucky’s for keeping information about the grandpar- connections to Enlightenment and Romantic- ents’ estate from the Keats children, an inher- era British literati. In his biography of George itance that would have helped John greatly Keats, Crutcher follows the brother of the during his fatal illness. Crutcher also blames famous poet from London to Louisville, from Abbey for ending the boys’ education too early. immigration to settlement. George’s life lends According to Crutcher, George’s inability to itself to a cultural-historical view of the past in attend college necessitated his move to America, which writers and artists commune with busi- where he could secure a better quality of life by nessmen and politicians as neighbors, friends, investing in land and new business. and relatives. George’s early years in London George remained devoted to his siblings, illuminate the circumstances of his brother John. particularly John and their younger brother And the occupations of his later years demon- Tom. They shared a strong emotional and strate that early nineteenth century Louisville financial bond that bordered on codepen- was more than a frontier riverboat town, it was dency. George assiduously cared for Tom as he also a hub of cultural activity with a cosmopoli- died from tuberculosis, and he doted on John’s tan sensibility. writing, acting as his copyist and agent. But Crutcher is George’s great-great-great grand- when George left for America, John’s friends son and the author of The Keats Family (2009), accused George of abandoning his brothers to an investigation of the lives of George’s prog- want and ill health. This criticism has trickled eny. The earlier work reads like annotated fam- down through the years to taint George’s leg- ily tree, while Crutcher’s newest work offers a acy, and some Keats scholars have portrayed fluent historical narrative. Crutcher divides the him as the greedy, money-driven brother out chapters by significant time periods in George’s for his own interests and profit. In contrast, life, starting with the fate of his parents and Crutcher argues convincingly that George

88 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY BOOK REVIEWS had selfless motives for seeking his fortune in America. He early recognized that of the Keats children only he possessed the necessary physical ability and work ethic to supplement their dwindling inheritance. George believed he had to leave for the American frontier because only there could he earn an income necessary to provide for his siblings. Shortly after George arrived in Kentucky, he lost the bulk of his inheritance to the nat- uralist John James Audubon, who sold him part ownership in a steamboat. Audubon did not have the legal rights to the boat and used George’s money to pay his creditors. Crutcher’s painstaking research shows that Audubon attempted to claim the property from its true owners, although historians have assumed the boat sank. In fact, creditors had sent the boat to New Orleans to evade Audubon’s effort to recover it. After Tom’s death some of John’s Lawrence M. Crutcher. George Keats of Kentucky: A Life. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. friends accused George of taking John’s portion 392 pp. ISBN: 9780813136882 (cloth), $40.00. of Tom’s inheritance back to America with him, hastening the poet’s untimely end. Crutcher exonerates George from this supposed misdeed by performing a careful, twenty-page account- ing of the Jennings estate, Tom’s inheritance, and various personal loans that passed back and new and represent no small amount of research, forth between John and George. The records especially as Crutcher mentions many of the show that George treated John fairly. Crutcher men by name only in the text. The entire appen- proves that the poet’s predisposition to spend dix comprises one sixth of the book, providing a beyond his means—traveling extensively to live timeline of George’s life, his will, and an inven- the poet’s life of inspiration and creativity—left tory of his library upon his death. Crutcher has him impoverished at the end of his life. George written a definitive biography of George Keats. intended to send money back to Britain when He paints a vivid picture of early nineteenth cen- he had enough, but neither John nor Tom lived tury Louisville life and trans-Atlantic travel that long enough to see George’s success. will satisfy many readers. It will prove most useful Crutcher also delineates George’s civic involve- to Keats scholars, Louisville historians, and family ment in Louisville, and he complements the work genealogists seeking biographies of ancestors asso- with an appendix that offers short biographies of ciated with George. all the people he mentions in the narrative. Those Abigail M. Smith detailing George’s Kentucky acquaintances are all Jefferson County Public Schools

FALL 2014 89 BOOK REVIEWS Ministers and Masters Methodism, Manhood, and Honor in the Old South Charity R. Carney

ethodism, a British import to America Mand then a northern import to the southern United States, faced a number of challenges as it expanded south. Many features of early American Methodist belief, structure, and practice did not fit well in the developing southern culture, especially in its increasing reliance on the slave system. In fact, early Methodist circuit riders, most of who came from the North, often made it their distinct mission to rebuke southerners’ slave-owning, dueling, and perceived irreligiosity, and to redeem and trans- form the region. “Over time, however,” Charity Carney argues, “ministers became integrated into the society that they were trying to save” (10). Ministers and Masters, through a sustained focus on southern Methodist men, especially ministers, provides the best and most thorough answer to the question of how Methodism became successful in the South and how it changed in order to achieve this success. Charity R. Carney. Ministers and Masters: Methodism, Manhood, and Honor in the Old South. Baton Rouge: Carney’s book, based on her University of Louisiana State University Press, 2011. 216 pp. Alabama history dissertation, fills a few historio- ISBN: 9780807138861 (cloth), $35.00. graphical gaps. Readers likely will notice in its framework echoes of Christine Heyrman’s 1997 book Southern Cross. But whereas Heyrman’s most foundational category for organizing data. questions remain broad, focused on how “evan- Although the study of American Methodism gelicalism” became dominant in the South, often has been hampered by its insular denom- Carney takes a sharper focus, zeroing in on inationalism, the church still proves a histori- southern Methodist men, mostly ministers, and cally viable and useful analytic. Unlike too especially circuit riders. Ministers and Masters many Methodist histories, however, this book could be classified in a number of ways—south- should appeal to historians with interests out- ern history, religious history, history of slavery side the church and its history. Because Carney’s and religion, gender history—but readers might primary concern is the story of how a denomi- best understand it as a denominational history nation so out of step with southern society and of Methodism, since the church provides the culture became so successful, in telling that

90 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY BOOK REVIEWS story she offers numerous insights about south- decades before they spilled over. Carney devotes ern culture more broadly, especially at the inter- her final chapter to slavery, but its specter remains sections of masculinity, patriarchy, family life, present throughout the book. In the final chap- and slavery. ter, though, the dramatic changes in southern Circuit riders, at least early in their history, Methodist manhood became apparent. Carney were predominantly single and presumably celi- argues that “by the 1840s and 1850s Methodist bate. The church sought men willing to forsake ministers had become absorbed into southern the world, uninterested in political power and culture, and many of them supported slavery economic gain, a construction of manhood that as fervently as the congregants that they served” stood at odds with southern patriarchs’ honor (123). She does not use the word “declension,” culture and slave system. Methodist men, but clearly little compromises, specifically in Carney shows, found ways to navigate these the reframing of masculinity, led to an even- tensions, remaking themselves in order to make tual one hundred eighty-degree turn, and a once sense as southern men but still critique south- stridently abolitionist denomination became, ern manhood. For example, they told “tales that at least in the South, unabashedly proslavery. highlighted masculine boldness and ministerial Historians have described this transformation piety” as they attempted to prevent duels (23). before, but Carney’s emphasis on the impor- Over time, the ministers increasingly capitu- tance of changing understandings of masculin- lated to southern society, but they forged a ity provides a helpful addition to the literature. hybridized ideal of Methodist manhood, one Overall, Minsters and Masters, through its “centered on spiritual fatherhood rather than attention to discourse and rhetoric, offers a temporal mastery” (64), that allowed them to valuable contribution to the historiography of fit more or less comfortably in both southern American Methodism, as well as other subfields. society and the church. At times, Carney does not develop her analysis as Slavery became a ubiquitous issue for fully as she could or should, but she accomplishes Methodists, especially in the South, and it hung quite a bit in only 141 pages. In skillful prose, in the background of most denominational Carney makes a clear and persuasive argument. debates (as in U.S. politics writ large). The issue Charles McCrary prompted the church split along sectional lines Florida State University in 1844, but tensions over slavery bubbled for

FALL 2014 91 BOOK REVIEWS War upon the Land Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War Lisa M. Brady

s the first book-length environmental Brady begins by describing nature as an Ahistory of the Civil War, War Upon the “active force in human affairs” (3). She posits Land makes a significant contribution to nine- that most antebellum Americans nevertheless teenth century American history, and for that took it for granted that humans had the right reason alone scholars should read this volume. to subdue nature, and that soldiers carried this Lisa M. Brady, associate professor of American attitude with them after 1861. Wherever they history at Boise State University, examines a went, they tried to harness natural resources, range of manuscript sources, including per- whether water, earth, food, or timber, to win the sonal correspondence, diaries, memoirs, and war. The author focuses on three Union army journalists’ accounts, and draws on the schol- campaigns: Ulysses S. Grant’s siege of Vicksburg arship of Joan Cashin, Jack Temple Kirby, in 1862-1863, Philip Sheridan’s Shenandoah Timothy Silver, and Mart Stewart, among Valley campaign in 1864, and William T. others. Her clear and vigorous prose comple- Sherman’s Georgia and Carolinas campaign, ments the book’s compelling ideas. including his famous March to the Sea, in the winter of 1864-1865. She explores in detail what might be called environmental decision- making in each campaign, as officers exploited or overcame nature to achieve their objectives. All of these commanders, in Brady’s view, contributed in different ways to the North’s victory. Brady fills each of the chapters with thought- ful insights about the major military figures. She describes Grant’s ability to learn from his mistakes as he sought to harness the Mississippi River’s power, thus undermining the persistent stereotype of Grant as not particularly intelligent. She points out that Sheridan’s troops did not literally ruin the land in the Shenandoah Valley as some historians have claimed, but she notes that soldiers destroyed so many buildings and so much livestock that agricultural

Lisa M. Brady. War upon the Land: Military Strategy productivity dropped sharply for some time and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes dur- after 1864. Brady brings a new perspective to ing the American Civil War. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012. 208 pp. ISBN: 9780820342498 Sherman’s much-debated campaign, pointing (paper), $24.95. out that the worst of his destruction occurred

92 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY BOOK REVIEWS in the Carolinas, not Georgia, and the watery Practitioners of southern environmental history lowcountry proved his greatest opponent in the will be delighted by this monograph. Scholars winter of 1865. from other fields, including the history of river- Readers might hope for some treatment ine ecology, wildlife biology, medicine, and agri- of the southern army, since Confederates also culture, will learn from Brady’s work. Perhaps grappled with the natural environment. Did most important, military historians will benefit Confederate officers replicate Grant, Sheridan, from this original interpretation of the bloody and Sherman’s efforts? And did they fail? Such conflict that broke out in 1861. questions arise throughout the book, but the Joan E. Cashin author does not discuss them. But this does Ohio State University not detract from the book’s abundant merits.

States of Union Family and Change in the American Constitutional Order. Mark E. Brandon

ith proponents and opponents of domestic experiences that have both chal- Wsame-sex marriage across the United lenged and buttressed the legal order (7). States currently battling over the meaning of the marital union, Mark Brandon’s States of Union is a timely book. Opponents utilize a variety of arguments in their defense of “traditional” marriage, but most invoke, in some way, the idea that the monogamous, hetero- sexual, nuclear family form is trans-historical. Brandon dismisses this notion, insisting that family life has adapted to, and prompted, any number of legal, economic, political, geo- graphic and technological transformations. Brandon suggests that debates over the family and its relation to the larger society and constitutional order are not simply products of twentieth-century jurisprudence, but have persisted throughout history. Offering “dis- crete glimpses into American familial households” from the colonial era to the present, Mark E. Brandon. States of Union: Family and Change in the American Constitutional Order. Lawrence: including recent arguments over gay mar- University Press of Kansas, 2013. 352 pp. ISBN: riage, Brandon illuminates a multiplicity of 9780700619238 (cloth), $37.50.

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In order to flush out the basis for American nuclear family unit of the hegemonic culture. family law, Brandon examines English com- Native displacement was furthered by federal mon law from the Reformation to the eve of the programs which separated native children from American Revolution. Far from a set of “natu- their families in an effort to educate them in ral” relations, “English families were products of the ways of “civilization” and dismantle native law,” as the legally prescribed relations within claims to tribal lands. English households served as metaphors for Native families were not the only such units political authority (61). In the British colonies to witness extensive legal regulation on behalf of North America, however, families’ real-life of notions of civilization and preservation of the experiences—revolving around demographic social order. Brandon presents a concise chap- change and the relative egalitarian social land- ter on Mormonism, reviewing the group’s his- scape of the colonies (slaves excluded)—engen- tory, doctrine, its eventual embrace of polyga- dered new ideologies of authority and obliga- mous marriage, and subsequent court cases tion, which encompassed both the domestic which denounced the practice and linked the realm and the political order. American revo- monogamous, nuclear family to civilization lutionaries redesigned family relations through and national progress well before the “normal- the legal system—by abolishing primogeniture ized family received a constitutional stamp of and entail, for example—and reimagined politi- approval” from the Supreme Court in the 1920s cal authority with Lockean notions of contract (12). Still, Brandon shows that arguments over and consent. The relationship between fam- family persisted throughout the twentieth cen- ily and the political order did not cease with tury, as the Court further entwined the family the split from Britain, though, as the new state and the constitutional order through rulings governments increasingly assumed regulation on state sterilization laws, educational require- of household relations in an effort to buttress ments, women’s rights, equal protection, restric- patriarchal authority. tive zoning ordinances, food-stamp eligibility, Brandon then explores the intersections and even gun-rights. of law and family throughout the nineteenth Though Brandon admits this is not a com- century. After looking first to the slaveholding prehensive portrait of family life in American family, he turns to Americans migrating west, history, greater incorporation of recent histo- whose family-based self-sufficiency and kin- riography would have strengthened his overall networks helped establish political institutions argument. For instance, his chapter devoted to for extending America’s dominion across the slave families rehearses arguments from histo- continent. Frontier conditions, he argues, sub- rians Kenneth Stampp and Eugene Genovese. tly altered relations between husband and wife, Though both published groundbreaking works which in turn informed national opinions on on American slavery, generations of historians who could or could not be part of the consti- have since questioned and revised their con- tutional order. Western families assisted in dis- tentions. Attention to the scholarship of Dylan placing native tribes, too. Natives looked to the Penningroth and Stephanie McCurry, among village as the basic social unit, and their fami- others, would provide greater nuance to his dis- lies were often matrilineal, both of which con- cussion of the slave family and the slavehold- trasted sharply with the ideal monogamous, ing household. Curiously, too, he fails to even

94 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY BOOK REVIEWS footnote Peter Bardaglio’s Reconstructing the that the trans-historical, “natural” family is a Household (1995), which looks to the develop- cultural illusion. Contemporary struggles over ment of domestic relations law in the American “family values” and homosexuals’ right to legally South in the nineteenth century—with particu- pursue marriage are simply the latest manifesta- lar attention to slavery, the family, and the social tions of America’s long-running battle over the order—and which posits, as Brandon does, the meaning of family, its function in society, and Civil War as a conflict over the proper ordering the role of law in its regulation or protection. of the household. That being said, Brandon’s Jeffrey Thomas Perry ambitious narrative successfully demonstrates Purdue University

Confronting Slavery Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth-Century America Susan Cooper Guasco

f students of the nineteenth century United friends with James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, IStates know anything about Edward Coles, and James Monroe, among other members of it is that this slaveholder from Virginia freed the “first generation of natural aristocrats” (38). his slaves aboard a flatboat in the middle of the Dolley Madison was Coles’s cousin, and they Ohio River in 1819, and then served as anti- maintained a warm correspondence. slavery governor of Illinois during a debate over the future of slavery in the state. Beyond that, Coles fades into undeserved obscurity. In this meticulous and robust biography, Susan Cooper Guasco demonstrates that Edward Coles represented more than an antislavery one-hit-wonder, and places him at the center of the development of what she calls an “antislavery nationalism” before the Civil War. Edward Coles was the fifth of five sons of a wealthy and politically connected slaveholding Virginia family. With little hope of giving all of his children an inheritance, Coles’s father sought higher education for his sons. At the College of William and Mary, Coles learned to culti- vate personal and political friendships, and he Susan Cooper Guasco. Confronting Slavery: Edward learned moral philosophy, both of which would Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nine- teenth-Century America. DeKalb: Northern Illinois serve him well and shape his views throughout University Press, 2013. 265 pp. ISBN: 9780875806891 the rest of his life. Coles and his family were (paper), $28.95.

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Coles came away from William and Mary have loosened the elite planter’s grip on polit- with his youthful uneasiness about slavery con- ical power, potentially destabilizing support firmed, and determined to move west and free for slavery. Coles’s connections and influence the slaves he had inherited. However, at the urg- proved inadequate to accomplish something so ing of James Monroe, Coles accepted President radical in a slave state, however, and he returned James Madison’s invitation to become his private briefly to Illinois, where he subsequently lost secretary. After the War of 1812, a bout of ill- a senate election. During this low point, Nat ness, and a diplomatic journey to Russia, Coles Turner’s rebellion erupted in Virginia, and finally moved west, emancipated his slaves, and Coles returned again, hoping to capitalize on settled with them in Illinois. This part of the the alarm to promote his antislavery agenda. He story most readers know, but Guasco offers more later made a final move to Philadelphia, becom- texture and complexity than most accounts, ing increasingly involved with colonization focusing on Coles’s subsequent uneasiness with efforts. Coles believed that colonization offered the ambiguously proslavery views of many a middle ground between the extremism of the Illinoisans. Guasco handles the complicated his- Garrisonian abolitionists in the North, and the tory of slavery in Illinois deftly, if briefly. She entrenched slave aristocracy of the South. His gives readers a glimpse of a culture largely toler- struggles to find this middle ground, and to clar- ant of smallholder slavery despite the Northwest ify the principles of his antislavery nationalism, Ordinance’s ostensible ban, while the larger issue occupy the last quarter of the book, and offer of slavery’s westward expansion simultaneously a poignant portrait of a principled man trying initiated a heated political debate. to chart a course through turbulent political— Guasco’s account reminds readers that Illinois and increasingly sectional—water. In doing so, statehood, the Missouri Compromise, and the Coles emphasized what he believed was the Illinois slavery debates all took place within a Founding Fathers’ national antislavery vision, few years, and that the Mississippi and Ohio and the duty of the post-Revolutionary genera- Valleys represented ground zero for the emer- tion to see this principle brought to fruition. gence of political antislavery in the early repub- While primarily a political biography, the lic. Historians have often treated the Illinois slav- inclusion of personal details reveals Guasco’s ery debates as an internecine quarrel based in the efforts to get to know her subject well. The politics of personality in a largely party-less politi- book’s major strengths lie in Guasco’s recogni- cal culture, but Guasco re-positions these debates tion that Coles’s life and antislavery politics span as central to the construction of Coles’s antislav- eras, regions, and ideologies that historians often ery nationalism. In particular, Guasco notes that examine in isolation, preventing them from see- the most successful antislavery arguments drew ing nineteenth-century social and political histo- on existing race prejudice and the safeguarding ries as deeply intertwined. She effectively makes of white interests. Coles learned that to become the case for Coles’s own trajectory, demonstrates truly national in scope, successful antislavery the development of antislavery politics over sev- arguments could not echo abolitionism. eral decades, and thereby brings Coles more After serving as governor of Illinois, Coles fully into the historiography of antislavery. returned to Virginia to promote colonization Thomas Bahde and state constitutional reforms that would Oregon State University

96 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ANNOUNCEMENTS Exhibit documents half-century of work by Cincinnati Preservation Association

Celebrating 50 Years of Working Together Saving Places Cincinnati’s rich architectural history includes breweries, theaters, historic homes, entire neighborhoods and art deco buildings like Union Terminal and Carew Tower. While some buildings have succumbed to disrepair and the wrecking ball, many others still stand, some dating back two centuries, thanks in large part to the Cincinnati Preservation Association. Celebrating 50 Years of Working Together Saving Places shares the history of the Cincinnati Preservation Association and the many sites it has worked to save.

Started by three women in 1964 as the Miami Purchase Association in hopes of preserving Native American lands and early settlements in Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Preservation Association grew to become an organization that has helped save historic sites, buildings and neighborhoods. This exhibit features stories of the buildings they saved and those sadly lost despite their passionate efforts.

This fascinating exhibit featuring an architect’s model, photographs, architectural drawings, tools, and other artifacts will be open through April 2015 at Cincinnati Museum Center. For more information visit www.cincymuseum.org or call (513) 287-7000.

FALL 2014 97 ANNOUNCEMENTS Unwrap the history of ancient peoples, medicine and anatomy Mummies of the World

The voices of the past continue to tell stories, often through letters, diaries and photographs. Yet the bodies left behind can tell anthropologists, historians and scientists just as much. Working together, experts can get a rare glimpse into ancient societies through mummies and the rituals and processes used in their creation.

Mummies of the World takes you on a fascinating journey around the world and shares the stories that mummies from Egypt, Hungary, Ecuador, Germany, Great Britain and even the United States still have to tell. The largest exhibition of real mummies and related artifacts ever assembled, Mummies of the World showcases a collection of naturally and intentionally preserved mummies. From Egyptian mummies and shrunken heads to mummified cats and bodies intentionally mummified to show arteries, veins, muscles and organs for studying human anatomy, this collection will show you mummies in ways you’ve never experienced before.

Mummies of the World opens November 26 at Cincinnati Museum Center. For more information, visit www.cincymuseum.org or call (513) 287-7000.

98 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ANNOUNCEMENTS 100 years later, last passenger pigeon offers lesson of loss and triumph Martha: A Story of Extinction

The passenger pigeon once thrived in North America, traveling in groups so large it could take several minutes for a single flock to pass overhead. Through over- hunting and habitat destruction, the population rapidly declined and in 1914, the last passenger pigeon, Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo.

Martha: A Story of Extinction shares the story of Martha and her species, one of the best known examples of modern day extinction. Learn about the history of the passenger pigeon and the processes that led to their extinction. See passenger pigeon specimens and the hunting weapons that aided their rapid decline.

Though the passenger pigeon’s story ended with the death of Martha in 1914, the story for other endangered animals can end differently. The exhibit also intro- duces ways people can help save plants and animals from extinction today and those that have been brought back from the brink of extinction.

Martha: A Story of Extinction opens December 6 at Cincinnati Museum Center. For more information visit www.cincymuseum.org or call (513) 287-7000.

FALL 2014 99 ANNOUNCEMENTS

1310 South Third Street, Louisville, KY 40208

FELLOWSHIPS AND INTERNSHIPS Filson Fellowships and Internships encourage the scholarly use of our nationally significant collections by providing support for travel and lodging. Fellowships are designed to encourage research in all aspects of the history of Kentucky, the Ohio Valley region, and the Upper South. Internships provide practical experience in collections management and research for graduate students.

FELLOWSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT

Due to construction and renovations that are part of The Filson’s Campus Expansion Project, fellowship applications will not be accepted in October 2014 or February 2015. Fellowship applications will be accepted again in October 2015 and thereafter.

If you have received a Fellowship but have not yet conducted your research, you should do so before March 1, 2015.

For more information about our Fellowships and Internships, please visit www.filsonhistorical.org

100 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Submission Information for Contributors to

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