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61 Chapter Three Voice of Purpose Away with religious proscription, say we. We are living in the Nineteenth Century—not the middle ages! Cincinnati Daily Times, August 11, 1853 The most enduring legacy of Ohio’s private schools is that they succeeded in educating and grooming a generation of leaders, teachers, and activists , including Peter H. Clark. By the early 1840s, a core group of African American men and women had been educated in these private schools and were, in turn, educating others. This generation of educated African Americans also led the struggle for access to common schools. Beginning in the early 1840s, local activists shifted their focus from opening private schools to gaining access to public ones. After all, private school education had not been wholly successful: philanthropy could not meet all of the operating expenses; increasing tuition costs was not feasible given most parents’ inability to pay even a small fee. Consequently, many of these schools were extremely short-lived. Even when benevolent whites completely funded these private schools, as Hiram Gilmore had done with Cincinnati High School, they still failed. Moreover, private schools could not meet the needs of the rapidly growing, largely unschooled black population . African American leaders realized that the only hope for their full education would be by gaining access to public schools. AfricanAmerican leaders attacked their exclusion from public schools from at least two angles. First, the 1844 state convention of black men resolved to fight for common school privileges by “testing the validity and constitutionality of those statute laws” that excluded African Americans.1 There is no evidence that they ever put this plan into action, however. Instead, black Ohioans constructed their strongest argument for access to public education on the unjust tax system.An 1829 Ohio act mandated that black property holders pay a school tax, and that their monies would be 62 America’s First Black Socialist appropriated by township trustees for their education in separate schools.2 In practice, however,AfricanAmericans paid taxes for more than a decade, and no separate school fund or schools for their benefit ever materialized. Although subsequent state legislation exempted them from paying school taxes altogether, they continued to be taxed.3 In essence, their tax dollars supported the very same public schools that excluded them. Although African Americans in some Ohio communities requested that their share of the local school funds be refunded so they could start their own schools, such requests were typically ignored.4 A power struggle between Ohio Whigs and Democrats in the 1848– 1849 state legislature provided the conditions that would dismantle the laws that codified African Americans’ noncitizenship status. Free Soil legislators first proposed to repeal the Black Laws, including legislation that denied African Americans access to public schools. In a deal that would swing the balance of power to the Whigs or Democrats, two Free Soil representatives offered their votes to the party that would support, among other things, the establishment of a public school system for African American children. Democrats accepted the offer and moved forward with honoring the terms of the deal. On February 10, 1849, the bill that overturned the state’s Black Laws passed, effectively removing from Ohio’s law books almost all laws that allowed for the denial of civil rights on the grounds of race.5 After a battle of more than twenty years, no more barriers remained. The legislature, careful not to authorize integration in the schools, provided for separate public school systems for African American children. These schools were supposed to receive a proportionate share of the township’s public funds allocated for common schools.6 The Ohio legislature also made provisions for African Americans to manage and control their own schools through a Colored School Board. Classes would be taught by black teachers, and the school systems would be managed by a black school board, to be elected by black male property owners from each district.7 Hence, this community would have autonomy and selfdetermination from the classroom to the school board, pedagogy to policy. Cincinnati’s black community wasted no time getting schools up and running. It quickly elected six trustees to manage the schools, including John I. Gaines as the president of the board. The newly elected trustees commenced organizing schools and hiring teachers: Clark was hired as the first teacher. Unfortunately, the Cincinnati city government frustrated these efforts to educate black children. When the African American school board tried to withdraw monies from the school...

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