Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America

9. The Stirrings of the Modern Civil Rights Movement in Cincinnati, Ohio, 1943-1953

Chapter 9 The Stirrings of the Modern Civil Rights Movement in Cincinnati, Ohio, – Michael Washington Amid the domestic tensions of World War II, in the summer of  a delegation of African Americans in Cincinnati called for a meeting with the mayor. Their purpose was to promote “interracial cooperation and good city administration” by forming a politically independent “citizens committee on unity.” The meeting would be a fateful one, for when Mayor James G. Stewart consented to appoint an interracial, interfaith group of leaders to the committee, he gave legitimacy to what would become the vehicle by which African Americans would carry out the struggle for civil rights for the next two decades and usher in the modern civil rights movement in Cincinnati.1 Functioning in an advisory capacity, but eschewing advocacy, the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee (MFRC) did not foresee and certainly never endorsed radical solutions to potentially volatile racial issues. Indeed, on issues such as police brutality its ineffectiveness generated more racial animosity than it quelled. It was a cautious approach to issues long simmering in the black community, and it would provoke other groups to assume more radical protest tactics. A coalition of local organizations, including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Citizens Committee for Human Rights (CCHR),2 the West End Civic League, the Jewish Community Council, and the Women’s City Club, soon mobilized to counter discrimination in restaurants, stores, employment, and colleges of music as well as to counter police brutality, using methods that ranged from back-room negotiating to mass protest.  While historians date the beginning of the modern civil rights movement with Montgomery in , little note has been taken that the radical protest tactics deployed in the Northern city of Cincinnati in the early s and s had already proven effective before Montgomery and the Southern struggles against Jim Crow. Significantly, in the absence of a single charismatic leader like King, Malcolm, or Huey, these seminal struggles in Cincinnati have escaped national attention. In Cincinnati it was unnamed local people, working through organizations and coalitions and sometimes as individuals, who played decisive roles in creating and sustaining the push for civil rights. While these struggles took place in a Northern border city,3 they were waged against a system of racial discrimination markedly similar to that found in the South (though many in Cincinnati would repeatedly deny the similarities). This point contradicts the widely held notion of a color line separating de jure segregation in the South and the de facto version found in Northern cities like Cincinnati, Chicago, and Detroit; for in the North residential segregation was a matter of local as well as national policy , enforced by law. Moreover, in the North, as in the South, black voters were frequently disenfranchised by racist political maneuvers. Indeed, it is accurate to describe the racial atmosphere of the North during the postwar period as a state of apartheid, and Cincinnati, a Northern city with Southern sympathies, as an important reminder of the many movements outside the South that have gone unnoticed by historians. This essay examines the city’s civil rights protest movement from  to , from the emergence of the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee to the desegregation of one of the city’s most cherished institutions, Coney Island Amusement Park. The MFRC was a citizens’ advisory committee appointed by the mayor to address issues related to human relations and tolerance. Fearful of provoking racial tensions that might arise from the perception that it was a black advocacy group, the committee refused to challenge the status quo, choosing, instead, a conciliatory approach to potentially volatile racial issues. It was the executive director of the Cincinnati Community Chest’s Division of Negro Welfare who subverted the gradualist approach of the MFRC by mobilizing local grassroots organizations to mount a direct challenge to racial discrimination throughout the city. Their frontal assault on segregation would culminate in a mass struggle for access to “the largest single public accommodation in Greater Cincinnati,” the Coney Island Amusement Park.4 This laid the  m i c h a e l wa s h i n g t o n groundwork for a full-fledged civil rights movement in postwar Cincinnati and would serve as a testing ground for tactics that would be used by the movement nationwide. The Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee...