By Matt Doran

On March 8, 1977 U.S. Circuit Court Judge Robert Duncan issued his ruling in the case of Penick v. Columbus Board of Education. Duncan ruled that the Columbus Board of Education had deliberately kept white and African-American students separate by creating school boundaries that sent African-American students to predominantly African-American schools and white students to predominantly white schools.

As evidence, Duncan cited policy as far back as 1909 when Champion Avenue School was established as a school for African-American students. There they were taught by African-American teachers (including four that been transferred from predominately white schools).  White students from the same neighborhoods attended different schools.

Following Duncan’s ruling, the Columbus Board of Education developed a plan to desegregate the district. Some white students were bused to traditionally African-American schools, and some African-American students were bused to predominantly white schools. 

Judge Duncan was a Columbus resident who lived in the Berwick neighborhood on the Near East Side. The desegregation plan required Duncan’s daughter to be bused to Olde Orchard Elementary on the Far East Side.  On the day the buses rolled, two white supremacists called in a bomb threat to the school. Gregory S. Jacobs was a third-grader at Olde Orchard that day and a schoolmate of the judge’s daughter.  In 1998, Jacobs wrote the book, Getting Around Brown: Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools, a comprehensive account of school desegregation in Columbus. 

Click here to view the Teaching Columbus resources on desegregation, including newspaper articles and a panel discussion. 

By Matt Doran
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The National Park service has recently approved the National Register of Historic Places nomination for Hanford Village. Hanford was founded as a separate village in 1909 and became majority African American during the Great Migration.

The George Washington Carver subdivision of Hanford (between Main St. & Livingston Ave. and Alum Creek Dr. & Nelson Rd.) was established in 1946 to meet the postwar housing demand. The Carver subdivision was marketed to returning African-American soldiers. Many of the original homeowners were Tuskegee Airmen who were stationed at nearby Lockbourne Air Base (Rickenbacker).

When Interstate 70 came through Columbus in the 1960s, many homes in Hanford Village were eliminated, and only a few houses remained on the side of Hanford adjacent to the popular Hanford Park.

For photographs of the homes and information about their original owners, check out the Teaching Columbus Historic Sites Collection.

Click here for a Hanford Village classroom inquiry activity PowerPoint presentation. 
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By Matt Doran

The Columbus Urban League, established in 1918, was the most active organization working against the Columbus color line during the period of the Great Migration.  Dr. Nimrod Booker Allen, a social worker and graduate of Yale Divinity School, was hired as the first general secretary, a position he continued to hold until his retirement in 1954.

An ad in the May 10, 1919 edition of the Ohio State Monitor outlines the purpose and activities of the Columbus Urban League. Of the League’s purpose, the ad states that it is founded, " especially to give the man farthest down a chance.  It holds as a firm principle that Social Service must mean that an opportunity must be given to all men to develop themselves fully, and that every man has a right to be happy…"  The ad further notes its commitment to African-American migrants stating that “less than two dollars per capita has been spent on these brothers of ours to school them and make them citizens.”
Eight positions are cited as part of the Leagues activities: a traveler’s aid, a nurse, a home-builder, an employment secretary, an industrial group worker (to improve employer/employee relations), a parole investigator, four teachers for African-American soldiers, and two court visitors to assist those released from jail.   A similar ad appearing in the Cleveland Advocate makes particular note of the League’s work with the city’s Director of Public Safety.  The League’s court visitors made recommendations on parole decisions.  Prisoners who were granted parole then reported weekly to an appointed “Big Brother” or “Big Sister.” 

By Doreen Uhas Sauer

The King-Lincoln-Bronzeville Neighborhood has long been known for its artistic contributions to the city and to the nation.  By the 1920s East Long Street was the center of black commercial, social, and entertainment life. Shops, theaters, restaurants, and jazz clubs proliferated. The Plaza Hotel hosted Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Fats Waller—whose appearances would influence young Columbus musicians and vocalists. The Empress movie theater opened in 1920. Mt. Vernon Avenue was equally vibrant, and in the area, the golden age of music was in the popularity of the jazz clubs in the 1940s, especially after World War II when famous musicians played the local scene. If they played in white downtown hotels, they returned to the neighborhood to play long into the night to large crowds and with local talented musicians. Live jazz could be heard in twenty different clubs. There were also five hotels and two theaters—two of which still exist—the Lincoln and the Pythian (King Arts Complex). 
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By Doreen Uhas Sauer

By the late 19th century, African American families could be found in parts of the Badlands (around Fort Hayes); by the Olentangy River and West Lane Avenue; by the Olentangy River and West 11th Avenue; Long Street and North High; the Hilltop (by the state institutions); Burnside Heights (Hilltop/Westgate area); Flytown (near North Side), and later Hanford Village and Teakwood Heights. African Americans lived in so many different areas that Columbus Schools actually desegregated 90 years before court-ordered desegregation. 

Between 1900 and 1940, the African-American population grew from 9,000 to 39,000. By World War I and the Great Migration of African Americans seeking work and opportunity in the north, one neighborhood grew substantially larger—the East side—because it was practical to live near work near the railroads and companies dependent upon the railroads. The African American community moved eastward along Long Street, despite the efforts of some white businessmen to hold the commercial and housing line near what is now St. Paul’s AME Church. 

By Doreen Uhas Sauer

Famous educator Booker T. Washington made frequent appearances in Columbus in the early 20th century.  He was here for conventions, special occasions with families he knew well (like Ralph Tyler, auditor of the U.S. Navy and Dr. Scarborough, president of Wilberforce), and student Bible conferences. 

Sometimes Dr. Washington stayed in a rooming house on West Eleventh Avenue with a family he knew from St. Paul’s AME Church.  When he did so, he liked to work in the mornings in bed so he could spread his papers out while he wrote.  The daughter of the family, as a small child, was asked to take a tray with coffee to him one morning, and after leaving the tray ran down the stairs to report an “accident.” Dr. Washington, she announced, had broken his glasses and would not be able to work.  Did he break them in half, her mother asked? Yes, the top of the glasses are gone. Her mother smiled; no problem. Her daughter had never seen reading glasses before. 

On May 24, 1900, Dr. Washington spoke at Memorial Hall (the old COSI building that is now county offices on Broad Street) because the hall had a large seating capacity, and on his previous visit to Columbus, he spoke at Reverend Washington Gladden’s church. But thousands had to be turned away. Dr. Washington was in town for a special Student Bible Conference and would speak without charge at Memorial Hall. It was noted in the newspapers that, “all throughout the South, as well as the North, the leading white citizens, business and professional men, and white women of culture and refinement crowded to hear him. Even the governor and other state officials were present and accorded him the greatest courtesy.”

It was noted he would stay at the North Hotel (no longer there but would have been in the Short North) where rooms had been reserved for him. But this was a change of plans from the original reservation at the prestigious Neil House, across from the Statehouse.  Though Dr. Washington had stayed at the Neil House before and on another occasion the fine Chittenden Hotel, this time, however, the Neil House could make no assurances that he (and the other African American men who were to attend the conference) would be welcome.

By Matt Doran

If Ohio was to be the Promised Land that many African-American migrants had sought, it would take much work to accomplish.  Just as African Americans took an active role in moving north, they engaged in an equally determined effort to shape the Promised Land. 

In Ohio’s capital city of Columbus, a variety of organizations emerged to aid the growing urban African-American population. African-American leaders in Columbus took decisive steps to counter the problems of Columbus, including social ills, crime, and white prejudice and discrimination. Most of the governing boards of these organizations were interracial, and they were predominantly staffed by African Americans. 

Organizations included:

• Young Men’s Christian Association (African American Branch- Spring Street), founded 1912. Provided opportunities for spiritual, intellectual, and physical growth; food, shelter. Included a Business and Professional Men’s Club.
• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Columbus Chapter), founded 1915. Advocated for civil rights, especially lobbying for the Beatty Civil Rights Bill.
• Columbus Home for Colored Girls, founded 1917. Offered shelter, promoted the “social, moral, intellectual, industrial and religious advancement of women and girls.”
• Young Women’s Christian Association (African American Branch – E. Long), founded 1918. Provided inexpensive emergency housing for women.
• Columbus Urban League, founded 1918. Empowered African Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream. Placed unemployed persons in jobs, provided adult education, and assistance in housing.

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The efforts by the African-American community to weaken the city’s color line provide early examples of grassroots efforts to achieve racial equality.  These methods served as a foundation for civil rights activism in subsequent decades.  

By Matt Doran

During and after World War I, most African Americans in Ohio's major cities lived in largely segregated neighborhoods.  By 1930, for example, 65 percent of African Americans in Columbus lived in just four of the 19 census districts in the city.  

During World War I, housing shortages limited the options for African-American migrants in Ohio.  Often confined to overcrowded and low-rent neighborhoods, African Americans also became easy victims of landlords who took advantage of housing shortages by engaging in rent profiteering. After the war, discriminatory practices and “white flight” resulted in greater segregation within urban areas.   

African Americans in Ohio cities faced problems common to rapidly urbanizing areas.  They were especially vulnerable to health problems such as pneumonia and tuberculosis, and more likely to die from these diseases than whites.  Ohio cities were also susceptible to common “vices” of city life—brothels, gambling houses, and saloons.  In Columbus, the brothels and opium den in the “Badlands” neighborhood and “red light district” were largely ignored by the city government.   Not surprisingly, adult crime and juvenile delinquency also experienced a surge in Ohio’s cities. 

By Matt Doran

In the first three decades of the twentieth century, the United States witnessed a profound and lasting demographic change. During this period, an estimated 1.5 million African Americans left the predominantly rural South to live and work in northern cities in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York. Known as the Great Migration, this mass movement often drew upon biblical imagery of the “exodus” to describe African Americans’ journey from the land of enslavement in the South to the Promised Land in the North. Motivated by opportunities for economic and political advancement, African Americans chose to leave the South for northern cities like Columbus, Ohio, where they created institutions and social organizations to help overcome the color line. 
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Between 1910 and 1930, African-American migration to Ohio swelled the state’s cities.  Ohio’s three largest cities – Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus— saw the greatest migrations.  Cincinnati’s Black population increased from 19,639 in 1910 to 47,818 in 1930.  Columbus saw an increase from 12,379 to 32,774 in those same years.  The greatest increase was in Cleveland, where the African-American population reached 71, 899 by 1930, up from just 8,448 two decades earlier. Given all they had heard about opportunities in the North, the expectations of African Americans in Ohio were high.  Ronald Takaki tells  the story of a group of migrants who, after crossing the Ohio River, “knelt down in prayer and sang ‘I Done Come out of the Land of Egypt with Good News.’”

Was Ohio the Promised Land that so many migrants longed for?   On the political front, African Americans in Ohio enjoyed the franchise, as there were no voting restrictions like they had known in the South. Further, Ohio’s Civil Rights Law of 1884 (also known as the Public Accommodations Law) banned segregation and discrimination based on race in public facilities.  In addition, Ohio’s 1896 antilynching legislation, known as the Smith Law, was hailed as a progressive attempt to curtail anti-black violence.  Nevertheless, weak enforcement mechanisms and other forms of de facto segregation undermined Ohio’s status as a land of opportunity for African Americans.   

In his book, Ohio: The History of People, historian Andrew Cayton paints a grim picture of Ohio’s increasingly sharp color line.  Noting the increasing white intolerance, workplace discrimination, and mob violence, Cayton considers the state a “hostile world” for newly arrived African Americans.  In his definitive work, African Americans and the Color Line in Ohio, 1915-1930, historian William W. Giffin supplies the details that support Cayton’s conclusion.  Both Giffin and Cayton point out that Ohio’s color line stiffened in the wake of the Great Migration, as whites reacted in fear to the increasing number of African Americans, nearly 99 percent of which settled in cities. According to Giffin, African-American migrants in Ohio faced a number problems including: poor housing conditions in increasingly segregated neighborhoods, increased crime, health problems and other “vices” of city life, discrimination in public accommodations, and racial intolerance that often culminated in violence and intimidation.  

By Doreen Uhas Sauer
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In 1988, Columbus physician Dr. William Kenneth Allen wrote a historical recollection of African American “pioneer” physicians in Columbus. These physicians worked in an era when diagnosis and compassion had to take the place of antibiotics and antihypertensive medicine. They were also pioneers who “chipped away at the wall of racial discrimination and were an important part of the historical fabric of our city.”

One of the physicians he profiled was Arthur Kelton Lawrence, born in 1875 (died in 1954) in Columbus.  If his name is familiar it is because his middle name, Kelton, was given to him by his parents, Thomas and Martha Lawrence, to recognize that his parents met under extraordinary circumstances. 
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Thomas Lawrence was employed by the Kelton family, and Martha was a sickly child who was found “in the bushes,” while passing through Columbus on the Underground Railroad.  After their marriage in the front parlor of the Kelton House, they received a gift of land from the Kelton family in what is now the American Addition. Today the Kelton House, a well-known house museum on Town Street, recognizes the family’s history and the many blacks and whites who served as conductors on the Underground Railroad.

Dr. Lawrence attended Columbus Public Schools, graduated from the College of Pharmacy at Ohio State and completed his M.D. in 1907 at Starling Ohio Medical College.  He served in the Spanish-American War as a hospital steward.

He left Columbus in 1907 to take on a partnership in private practice in Kansas City, and later Wichita where he made house calls on a motorcycle—and later purchased an auto, first a coupe and then a touring sedan. He married a girl from Oklahoma and they had two sons. 
When advised his mother was seriously ill, Dr. Lawrence returned to Columbus in 1921 by car.  Because of unpaved dirt roads, he constructed a hammock that hung from the car’s ceiling to transport his youngest infant son.

Upon his return to Columbus, Dr. Lawrence set up practice in the Williams Building, 681 East Long, re-joined Second Baptist Church where he served as senior choir director and taught Sunday School, and was a member of the Masonic Lodge, the Columbus Academy of Medicine, the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, the NAACP and other groups. In 1941 he was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt as the examining physician for the Franklin County Local Draft Board.  

By Doreen Uhas Sauer

As the state capital, Columbus, Ohio was often a hotbed of political meetings, speeches by famous people, rallies, and organizing around the turn of the 20th Century. In October, 1900, Columbus was the site of a nonpartisan meeting of African Americans who were united in their condemnation of a “reign of terror” that affected African Americans in the South.

They wanted to impress upon the public that they too should be against lawlessness, at a time when many of these violent activities were unknown or overlooked by the American public.
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The nonpartisan meeting reported the reign of terror was:

They appealed to people to help defend life and liberty and the majesty of the law. These organizers, who were working across the Republican and Democratic lines, also raised controversial issues too, condemning the WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union) who were engaged in endless prayers to bring about the demise of alcohol. ​

By Matt Doran

In 1863, Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, with authorization from President Abraham Lincoln, organized the 54th and 55th Volunteer Infantry, the first African-American regiments in the American Civil War. Frederick Douglass, a leading African-American abolitionist, immediately became an active recruiter for the Union Army.  Douglass published this notice in his newspaper, published in Rochester, New York: 

Douglass’s two sons, Charles and Lewis were the first two in the State of New York to enlist in the 54th Massachusetts regiment.  Many African-Americans from Ohio were also recruited to the 54th, until the formation of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the summer of 1863.

Later renamed the 5th United States Colored Infantry Regiment, Ohio’s African-American regiment was organized at Camp Delaware on the east side of the Olentangy River from August to November of 1863. Captain Lewis McCoy, at the direction of Ohio Governor David Tod, organized the regiment. 

The 5th Regiment moved to Norfolk, Virginia in November of 1863. The regiment saw action in Virginia as part of the Richmond–Petersburg Campaign and in North Carolina, where it participated in the attacks on Fort Fisher and Wilmington and the Carolinas Campaign.
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By the time the regiment was mustered out in 1865, they had lost six officers and 243 enlisted men. Sergeants Beatty, Holland, Pimm, and Brunson were awarded medals for gallantry in action by Congress and by General Benjamin F. Butler.

By Doreen Uhas Sauer

In 1952 an interview with Mrs. Nassie Lewis, 378 North Garfield Avenue, Columbus, Ohio, revealed a remarkable woman with a long memory.  At 110 years of age, Mrs. Lewis remembered growing up in Virginia and the Civil War. 

“I worked hard all day, and I danced all night, and slept on top a fence by the side of the road,” she said with a sense of humor. 

She said her birth records are in Tazwell, Virginia, near where she lived all of her life until she moved three weeks before to be with her remaining son, Ballard Lewis, who was 72 years old.

She continued her story,

By Doreen Uhas Sauer

In his dissertation on the American Addition community (1972), James Felix noted that although the Ordinance of Congress (1787) prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory, thirteen years later only 137 African Americans lived in the area that was to become Ohio. Felix asserted that there were no blacks living in what would be Franklin, Fairfield, or other neighboring counties at the time of Ohio statehood. It was during the War of 1812 that fugitive slaves arrived in central Ohio.

While historians today are apt to question whether or not African Americans were living in Franklin County before 1812, they agree that the Constitutional Convention in Chillicothe had problems resolving the “status of blacks,” though it did not specifically exclude blacks from settling in Ohio. 

Ohio was divided between the former New Englanders who settled north and the Kentucky and Virginia families who settled south. Columbus became a crossroads between Franklinton (primarily settled by Kentucky and Virginia families) and Worthington (established by New Englanders). 

Although slavery was prohibited in Ohio, the state did not stop masters from being accompanied by their slaves as they passed through or visited. Farmers along the Ohio River often employed slaves from Kentucky and Virginia.

If slaves became fugitives, they were more likely to be captured at cities on the river or at Lake Erie. Columbus offered a better chance of hiding; the city had a larger black population prior to the Civil War than any other northern city. Fugitives often hid in plain sight.  Some worked at the Neil House downtown, for example, where they became part of the anonymous backstage that served wealthy whites, including captured Southern generals who were allowed leave at Camp Chase. They forged certificates of freedom, took on domestic work, and farmed outside the city limits. This was the beginnings of small communities in unincorporated areas like American Addition, east of Joyce Avenue around 17th Avenue, and Burnside Heights, a community on the west side near Sullivant and Demorest Avenues.  

Prior to 1840, African Americans were considered without political rights and were placed in a class with “Indians and unnaturalized foreigners.” After 1840, they were subject to a series of Ohio’s Black Laws which regulated the movement and settlement of blacks and mulattoes. 
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Much of the historical documentation of Townsend comes from the epitaph on his gravestone along the Brown Road side of Green Lawn Cemetery in Columbus. ​The epitaph, written by Edward Orton, Jr., reads: