Читать книгу The Cincinnati Human Relations Commission - Phillip J. Obermiller - Страница 11

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Responding to the “Calamity in Detroit”

The 1940s

Popular belief notwithstanding, common threats such as economic downturns and external enemies did not fully unite Americans, nor did they calm ethnic, labor, or racial hostility in the United States during the twentieth century. Italians were lynched until at least 1915, Mexicans and Chinese through the 1930s, and blacks well into the 1960s. Growing ethnic antagonism resulted in severe immigration restriction laws being enacted in the early 1920s. In an effort “to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity,” federal legislation was passed to cap the numbers of Southern and Eastern European as well as African immigrants to this country; Arabs and people from East Asia and India were excluded altogether. During the 1930s anti-Semitism in the United States limited German-Jewish immigration to a mere fraction of the allotted quota, with tragic results.

In similar fashion, labor unrest often led to battles among workers and between workers and employers, some of them deadly enough to be called massacres. Between 1900 and 1999 only thirteen individual years passed without notable, often bloody, strikes in the agricultural, mining, and manufacturing sectors.

Racial conflict was also widespread. Where Jim Crow did not prevail, the Ku Klux Klan and vigilantism did. Race riots occurred throughout the century, including during the First and Second World Wars. During the Second World War, for instance, there were hundreds of major strikes, some of them to protest the hiring of black workers in defense industries. By instituting a federal Fair Employment Practice Commission, in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt narrowly averted a march on Washington by blacks protesting discriminatory defense industry hiring practices. In addition to protests by or about blacks, the century also saw anti-Greek, Hispanic/Latino, Puerto Rican, and Filipino riots. Clearly then, wars, a long period of economic depression, or intervals of prosperity and industrial growth never completely united Americans as a people.

In response to widespread prejudice and discrimination, resistance and advocacy groups sprang up throughout the twentieth century. They included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909), the National Urban League (1910), the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (1913), and more recently the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1960), the Irish American Cultural Institute (1962), the National Organization for Women (1966), the National Italian American Foundation (1975), the Human Rights Campaign (founded in 1980 as the Human Rights Campaign Fund, focusing on the election of candidates willing to treat LGBTQ issues equitably), and the American Association of People with Disabilities (1995) to name only a few. Although these dates would imply a period of quiescence through midcentury, this was not the case. For instance, the Congress of Racial Equality was founded in 1942 and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957.

Just as important, another thread of state and local activism, sometimes called the Civic Unity Movement, began to appear. Writing in 1951, the director of the Center for Human Relations Studies in New York, Dan W. Dodson, noted,

It was clear that the [Second World War] had forced a showdown on the second-class citizenship status of Negro citizens. It was also clear that in addition to the national aspect of the issue, it was also a community problem. Another revelation was the fact that municipal governments were woefully unprepared and inexperienced either to understand the problem or to deal with it. These conditions led to a new instrumentality of municipal government, namely, a commission in the office of the mayor composed of leading citizens charged with the responsibility of doing what they could to promote better intergroup relations within the community.

In this vein Maryland, which had instituted an Interracial Commission in 1927, renamed it in 1943 the Commission to Study Problems Affecting the Colored Population. In Detroit the Mayor’s Interracial Committee was founded in late 1943, the same year Los Angeles set up a Joint Committee for Interracial Progress, Chicago started its Mayor’s Committee on Race Relations, and St. Louis began a Race Relations Commission. New York City set up the Mayor’s Committee on Unity and Seattle started its Civic Unity Committee in 1944, while the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations was founded in 1951. Spurred by the rise of racial tensions during the Second World War, by 1950 there were fifty-two municipal “intergroup relations” committees operating in seventeen states. In the words of one commentator, “Every week, it seemed, some new program of intercultural education, or interracial good-will, or another council on unity and amity appeared.”

It is against this backdrop that the Cincinnati Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee (MFRC) was formed—not only as the local manifestation of a national trend, but more specifically in response to developments in Detroit.

. . .

In the summer of 1943 Cincinnati was worried. Earlier in the year, race rioting in Detroit had left thirty-four people dead, hundreds injured, and portions of the city in ashes. Racial tensions in Cincinnati were no different than in its smoldering counterpart to the north. Black women and men were engaged in the war effort as soldiers and defense workers, but most of Cincinnati’s synagogues, churches, neighborhoods, and schools remained segregated, while discrimination was the norm in local government, labor unions, colleges, restaurants, swimming pools, skating rinks, hospitals, department stores, amusement parks, and movie theaters. Blacks in Cincinnati were just as frustrated with the racial status quo as their counterparts in Detroit.

Two months after the Detroit riot Arnold B. Walker, writing in the Division of Negro Welfare Bulletin, posed the question on everyone’s mind: “Will There Be a Race Riot in Cincinnati?” Despite his acknowledgment of the prevailing racial tensions in the city, Walker concluded there would be no race riot in the city.

Nonetheless, the specter of Detroit loomed large in Cincinnati. Walker participated in a meeting with NAACP members and Mayor James G. Stewart just over two weeks after the Detroit riot to discuss ways to avoid similar turmoil in Cincinnati; the meeting was promoted under the heading This Must Not Happen Here. In the meeting it was agreed the mayor should convene a cross-section of citizens to form a “citizens committee on unity.” On October 7, Stewart convened a group with representation from the Division of Negro Welfare, B’nai B’rith, the Council of Churches, the Public Recreation Commission, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Catholic Charities, the Chamber of Commerce, and the black professional men in the Frontier Club with the aim of forming an intergroup relations committee sponsored by the city. On November 17 the Cincinnati City Council approved formation of the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee (MFRC).

The city had a history of human relations initiatives before the immediate crisis of the Detroit riot, including those initiated by the Negro Civic Welfare Association (which later became the Greater Cincinnati Urban League) and the Woman’s City Club of Greater Cincinnati (WCC). By 1927, for instance, the WCC had a race relations committee that actively promoted interracial understanding across the city, and in the early 1940s it founded the Fellowship House, an integrated organization dedicated to promoting interracial and ecumenical cooperation. Virginia Coffey, who would join the MFRC as assistant director in 1948, was an active participant in Fellowship House programs and was among the earliest black women admitted to membership in the Woman’s City Club, in the late 1940s. Three presidents of the WCC would serve on the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee, while others would serve on its successor, the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission. Although not directly rooted in the work of the WCC, these agencies would certainly be influenced by it. That influence apparently ran both ways because in the 1960s Coffey and her successor as assistant director at the MFRC, Eugene Sparrow, would be invited to speak at the WCC’s civic luncheon on race and other human relations issues.

In addition to promoting racial peace and wartime cooperation, the MFRC was committed to a pluralistic vision of society in which all race and culture (if not class) groups were considered of equal value. Tolerance and a respect for differences were to be promoted over prejudice and discrimination. The committee planned to do this by means of education, persuasion, and persistent effort, a form of gradualism that did not involve protest, resistance, or public demonstrations. Thus the MFRC was designed from the outset to be a subtle behind-the-scenes actor, an advisory body skilled in mediation but having no enforcement powers. The Cincinnati Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee was not unique but rather part of a national trend in setting up government-sponsored human relations organizations.

One hundred and nine citizens were appointed to the committee at its founding, of whom sixteen constituted a working Executive Committee. This unwieldy group initially led by its volunteer “secretary,” Robert Segal of the Jewish Community Relations Council, met for lunch each month at the Ninth and Walnut Street YWCA “because that was the only place downtown that would serve blacks and whites together.” The committee had no formal staff, operated with a $100 budget, and was thus often unable to respond effectively to the issues it was meant to address. But the group was able to organize and publish a newsletter, Building Together, and put on a luncheon honoring Paul Robeson, the athlete, actor, attorney, and activist.

The larger committee was broken down into subcommittees that “attacked such basic matters as employment, housing, schools, health, recreation, civil rights and police protection.” But even in its early years the committee’s efforts generated skepticism: “The more cynical and less progressive forces who become impatient often criticize this type of Citizen’s Committee, saying they delay in tackling urgent problems.” The skeptics may have had a point—“attacking” was a bit of hyperbole for the calm discussion, education, research, and persuasion that lay at the heart of the MFRC’s agenda.

By 1944 the MFRC had organized a Friendly Relations Week (September 17–24), the highlight of which was a daylong Race Relations Institute featuring the executive secretary of the NAACP, Walter White. The committee’s status began to improve after the city manager appropriated $10,000 for the MFRC’s annual budget, and the committee opened an office in City Hall where Martha Ong acted as temporary executive director. With a budget in hand, the group set about looking for a permanent director.

Marshall Bragdon became the full-time executive director in 1945, a position he would hold for the next twenty years. In Bragdon’s words, “a New York friend introduced me to Jeffrey Lazarus of Shillito’s [now Macy’s], who was hunting for an executive for Cincinnati’s young Friendly Relations Committee. He rashly decided I might do; the Committee said OK; and I rashly accepted.”

Born in Minneapolis, Bragdon attended Harvard as an undergraduate until forced to drop out by corrective surgery for the complications of polio he contracted in childhood. He went on to graduate from Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, and later became an editorial writer for the Springfield (MA) Republican, where he often wrote about reducing conflicts among social groups and the need to promote equality among all citizens. In addition to his work for the MFRC, Bragdon would become a founder and officer of the National Association of Intergroup Relations Officials and end his career as a consultant for the Community Relations Service of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The MFRC announced early on that it would not function as a black advocacy group. As Bragdon noted, “we are not working for the welfare of any one group, but are fostering improvements in conditions . . . which will safeguard the rights of all citizens.” Nevertheless, its attention was almost entirely focused on race relations by the latter half of the 1940s.

In 1946, for example, four black men stopped a white couple and reportedly raped the woman while holding the man at gunpoint. Anger flared among white Cincinnatians, some of whom armed themselves, and mass meetings were called for. The MFRC tried to head off the specter of vigilantism and open violence by contacting religious and civic leaders to advise “common sense and moderation.” This tense situation was eventually defused by the interventions of both black and white leaders. Subsequently the MFRC conducted a study that found that the local press and radio had added fuel to the racial fires by their “injudicious and even hysterical” reporting on the crime. Bragdon and an MFRC board member met with Cincinnati Enquirer editor Robert Ferger and Cincinnati Times-Star editor Hulbert Taft Sr., eliciting assurances that apparent racial conflicts would be reported with more restraint in the future.

Janet E. Smith, MFRC administrative assistant, in a summary of the agency’s first five years, credited the committee with “the [resolution] of conflict and tension, thus preventing a riot in the summer of 1946. This single accomplishment alone may be said to justify the city’s ‘investment’ in MFRC, for riots can cost a city untold sums in property damage, injury, loss of life, and repair of community relations.” Clearly the MFRC did not single-handedly prevent a riot that summer, but Smith’s comment shows how much the fear of rioting still resonated in Cincinnati three years after the Detroit upheaval.

Although it shared offices with the police division’s race relations detail at city hall, the committee was frequently called upon to address issues of police harassment of black citizens. While the NAACP and other civic groups declared “war on police brutality,” the MFRC continued to take a very understated and hands-off approach. This was the committee’s stance in the 1946 case of Nathan Wright, a black ministerial student, who reported being abused and threatened by police. The police division and the city administration dismissed his accusations, inflaming the black community.

Caught in between, the MFRC decided to tread lightly, especially after city council member Gordon H. Scherer, foreshadowing the McCarthy era, suggested any criticism of the police was a Communist Party plot to “have the public lose confidence in the police departments as the opening wedge for overthrow of our government.” In later public comments Marshall Bragdon acknowledged Communist critiques of American racism, but deflected Scherer’s remarks by taking a human-relations tack: “the Communists can be answered only by millions of Americans taking up and living by the idea that the neighbor is to be respected and fairly treated, and what difference can be [sic] the color of his skin or his religion make, if he is a good man? By such behavior among Americans the Communists will be disarmed.”

In the following year Haney Bradley, a black man, was severely beaten by police. A local judge dismissed disorderly conduct charges against Bradley, commenting that he saw no reason for the beating the defendant had received. Nonetheless, the city’s safety director found no cause for disciplining the officers. In response, the Council of Churches, the NAACP, the Woman’s City Club, the Jewish Community Council, and the West End Civic League sent a letter to city council criticizing police procedures and the safety director for ignoring “social attitudes and tensions in the community.” The MFRC, although invited to be a signatory to the letter, declined to sign it. In both the Wright and the Bradley cases the committee, in keeping with its nonconfrontational, “impartial” stance, remained on the sidelines.

The committee’s stated purpose of “promoting tolerance” instead of “taking sides” also affected its actions in the area of expanding employment opportunities as a means of improving relations “among races, among religious groups, and between labor and management.” The committee adopted the stratagem of identifying employers who had integrated their workforces and proposing them as models for other companies to follow. When the West End Civic League took the more forceful position of picketing and leafleting employers resistant to integrating their workforces, the MFRC was called in as a mediator. The committee, represented by Bragdon, was marginally successful in this effort, which resulted in the hiring of two black workers and the publication of a pamphlet entitled They Do Work Together.

The MFRC continued its campaign to end discrimination in employment primarily through educational programs. As noted, it instituted its annual Friendly Relations Week in 1944, ever careful to indicate that this initiative included, but went well beyond, race relations. In 1948 the committee sponsored the local stop of the national Freedom Train, a mobile exhibition of famous documents from American history. This may have been one of the last echoes of the wartime civic unity movement; although the MFRC’s immediate interest was in promoting equality and tolerance, it apparently saw a larger role in encouraging civic unity as well.

During this time, critics saw the MFRC as either duplicative of the efforts of other organizations (e.g., NAACP, the city’s Negro Civic Welfare Association), ineffective in achieving its goals, or both. Despite attacks on the MFRC as a needless “frill” in the city budget, the city manager allocated $12,000 for the committee beginning in 1946. In 1948 two city council members balked at adding $1,000 to the MFRC’s budget for staff cost-of-living increases. The raises for Marshall Bragdon and Janet Smith rankled AFL business manager Bernie Schmidt, who wanted equal treatment for all city hall employees who were members of his union. This issue brought on the committee’s first administrative crisis and reorganization.

Caught between the union and the MFRC, city council compromised by offering to pay the committee a $15,000 lump sum to purchase its services on a contractual basis, provided the MFRC would become an independent, nonprofit organization. Despite misgivings by some MFRC board members that the agency would lose its official standing within the city, the committee incorporated as a nonprofit organization in early 1949. Marshall Bragdon noted publicly that it was still the mayor’s committee because the mayor would continue to appoint its members and that little fundamental change in the activities or role of the committee would result from its new status.

In addition to its usual advising, promoting, cooperating, educating, and publishing roles, however, the newly independent MFRC was charged under its new articles of incorporation to “receive and investigate complaints and initiate its own investigations . . . of (a) racial, religious, and ethnic group prejudice, tensions, discrimination and disorder caused thereby; (b) practices of discrimination against any person because of race, color, creed, racial origin or ancestry.” These investigations could result in nonbinding mediation or, more typically, in a report being issued. Moreover, the committee’s funding would now come from contracts with “the City of Cincinnati or other organizations,” a critical clause that would be used by both MFRC and later the CHRC to deflect charges in the 1950s and again in the 1970s of misuse of funds by the state auditor’s office.

Throughout the late 1940s the committee continued its efforts to end segregation in the Cincinnati Bar Association, the Coney Island amusement park, local movie theaters, restaurants, roller- and ice-skating rinks, and bowling alleys, as well as the physician staffs of local hospitals. It opened a borrowing library of over one thousand books, pamphlets, and other literature on intergroup relations. The MFRC also worked with the public library, local radio stations, public school teachers, and the Girl Scouts to promote intergroup tolerance and cooperation. During this time the committee helped the conversion of the Council of Social Agencies’ Division of Negro Welfare into the Cincinnati affiliate of the Urban League by donating $1,500 in discretionary monies for the new National Urban League office.

A signal event occurred in 1948, when Virginia Coffey, a native of West Virginia raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was hired as assistant director. Before joining the MFRC staff she taught in Cincinnati at the Harriet Beecher Stowe School, worked as an executive director of the West End YWCA branch, and formed the city’s first African American Girl Scout troop. Upon arriving at the MFRC she set about writing a column for various newspapers titled Speaking Out on Race Relations and giving human relations talks to civic and religious groups, social clubs, business organizations, and PTAs. With added staffing, the committee was also able to begin reorganizing its voluntary committee and membership structures, which had fallen into disarray.

While the MFRC was being organized, in autumn of 1943, a group of “Negro Organizations Interested in Racial Amity and Good City Government” sent a memo to Mayor Stewart and those active in the committee’s formation. The group wanted the new committee to focus on inequities in “such basic problem [areas] as housing, health and welfare, employment, recreation, etc.” These were considered the key underlying problems faced by blacks, of which rioting was only a symptom. The memo writers went on to note, “Whatever action is assumed by this committee, it should be clearly understood and publicized, we do not regard ourselves as a committee to ward off race riots. We do not expect rioting in Cincinnati” (emphasis in original). Nevertheless, Marshall Bragdon saw the Detroit riot and the tensions arising from the 1946 rape incident in Cincinnati as danger signs. In his words, “A riot-preventative was the first idea of the MFRC’s role . . . we turned the corner safely [in 1946]. But a flare-up was too close for comfort.” This is why he thought it prudent to establish an “emergency committee to act in [the] event of race riots” in 1949 in the wake of rioting in St. Louis when that city decided to integrate its oldest and largest swimming pool. The “Negro Organizations” that wrote the memo were prescient on two counts: no riots would occur in Cincinnati for another eighteen years, but the underlying problems of racial discrimination in housing, health and welfare, employment, and recreation, to name a few, would only continue to fester.

An informal evaluation of the MFRC’s first five years shows little progress made in civil rights, police-community relations, and countering anti-Semitism, or in integrating employment, housing, health care, and recreational facilities. Nevertheless, Janet E. Smith ended her summary of the committee’s first five years of activities with this insightful observation:

Progress in human relations cannot be charted precisely; nor can the causes—the reasons for a success—be measured. All we can say is, the existence and the work of the MFRC has been helping the community to reduce discrimination and increase positive understanding between groups. This five-year history gives abundant evidence of such help, even though we cannot always estimate MFRC’s exact contribution in each case.

The MFRC ended the 1940s true to its subtle roles of research, education, mediation, and persuasion. The committee’s passive efforts were not satisfactory to some, and other groups took a more aggressive stance; for instance, the Cincinnati Citizen’s Committee for Human Rights, formed in 1945, successfully began “visiting” restaurants that discriminated against black patrons. Nevertheless, the MFRC’s policy of gradualism and discretion would enable it to continue its mission despite the chilling effects of early-1950s McCarthyism.