Race and Racism in My Experience Growing Up
Growing up in Cincinnati
My dad was blown up in a reconnaissance Jeep going over a German land mine in France and survived. I was born just after the end of the Second World War. I grew up in an upper middle class family in an area of Cincinnati called Walnut Hills. Some streets were white, some mixed, and some black; at the end of our street and down the stairs was a bar and juke joint where all races mixed and danced. A couple of blocks away was a large, well attended Catholic church; we often walked to church. We walked a block or so to our neighborhood elementary school. We learned that the Pope was infallible; we should love our neighbors, and that all non-Catholics were going to hell (unless they converted; that changed later to an eternity in Limbo) – some very mixed messages for little kids.
Ohio was very proud of its Civil War heritage as the birthplace of Union Generals and Presidents; it was pretty solidly Republican. In Kentucky just across the Ohio River, there was a stronger identification with the Old South; Kentucky had been a slave owning state; when you went from one state to the next, you could feel the difference between the two cultures, separated by a broad river . Kentucky and neighboring West Virginia were solidly Democratic back then. There was a reverence in Ohio for the Union, for the Civil War dead and a residual distaste for the Confederacy that seemed absent on the other side of the river.
In Cincinnati, there were two political parties: Republicans and Charter (comprised of moderate and liberal Republicans and Democrats). Dad ran for the City Council and finished 18th out of 18 on the Charter ticket. Among those elected on the Charter ticket that year were Jack Gilligan (subsequently Ohio’s Governor), Dorothy Dolbey (first woman mayor of the Queen City) and Ted Berry (first black mayor of Cincinnati). Dad was on the Council of World Affairs, and as such he and Mom often hosted visitors of many different races from nations all over the world. The ones who still stick out in my memory were from the USSR and Brazil.
My first consciousness and memory about racism was in the 5th or 6th grade; we were playing football against a team bigger and faster than we were. We were an all white parochial school; they were a mostly black parochial school. One of the team’s leaders said “don’t worry, just kick them in the shins, they can’t stand the pain”. I thought to myself “well I couldn’t stand that pain either”, after all I’d lost my front teeth to someone’s cleated foot in a football game a year earlier. No kicking was done. We were soundly beaten by a much better team.
The following year, I went to public junior high; it was a highly competitive college entrance preparatory public school, drawing kids from all over the city, and located in what was then a poor black community. It was a couple of electric trolley bus rides away from where we lived; I remember the bus often losing connection with the electric trolley lines as we went around sharp corners. I don’t recall any racial conflict or any animus between whites and blacks; my recollections are that we all accepted each other and socialized together in class and during school hours. I don’t know what the experiences were like for our fellow black students; there were only a handful in a class of about 250. The Civil War and slavery and Ohio’s role was covered pretty extensively in our history class; we were exceedingly proud of our Generals like Grant and Sherman and of our state’s many Presidents (although some like Harding were quite corrupt). I have no recollection of learning much about the underground railway which ran through Cincinnati and up the state of Ohio and eventually to Canada. We were taught nothing about the City of Cincinnati’s long history of race and ethnic riots dating as far back as 1792, often with white mobs attacking black homes and businesses, other riots between the city’s Catholic and Protestant workers attacking each other over access to jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cincinnati_riots After school and after sports practice, we each went back to our own local neighborhoods where we hung out with friends and classmates who lived closest to us. For me there was not much social life around the school other than class and sports; social life was back in the neighborhood where we lived. That probably changed later when we had access to cars, but I left the school after the 9th grade. I was aware and conscious of my status as a Catholic kid from a broken home (a “no no” for good Catholics) and not about to share all the feeling and emotion that entailed; I cannot remember much sharing on the emotional level with my classmates at the time on any issue (let alone race relations), after all I was a young boy entering puberty, and we were all trying to be “both tough and cool” with decidedly mixed success; it was the time of James Dean and Elvis Presley. I do have a very vague recollection from the 50’s of knife fights among white gangs at Withrow HS, close to my grandparents’ home, in the aftermath of football games – Cincinnati’s version of West Side Story.
During this time period, we went to Arkansas with Dad on a family vacation combined with his work; he was serving as a lawyer investigating new manufacturing sites for Baldwin Pianos, and he was being courted to locate a new piano manufacturing plant in Arkansas. Little Rock had been the scene of crazy white parents screaming at little boys and girls going to school because of the color of their skins, of a crazy Governor defying the US government, of armed US troops protecting little children not much older than my brother, sisters and myself. This was beyond comprehension in what I had thought and was carefully taught was a great, civilized nation. We had learned of the evils of the recently defeated Nazis; we were in a cold war with the USSR, and now we were seeing another bleaker side to our own nation. We were being courted and our hosts went out of their way to dismiss the naked racism as a fringe, not the real, hospitable, welcoming Arkansas.
I remember noticing and asking about the signs for colored and white drinking fountains. Dad explained the history and evils of segregation in the South. We drove down to an oxbow close to the Mississippi River; along the way we saw black laborers picking cotton with big sacks on their backs, and again I asked why was this still going on. Dad explained the history of slavery, sharecropping and tenant farming. Ultimately, Baldwin opened manufacturing plants in Conway and Fayetteville, Arkansas.
In the late 50’s and early 60’s, Dad was also negotiating the opening of a new Baldwin piano manufacturing plant in Greenwood, Miss. in the middle of the Mississippi delta. This was a town with an interesting history to put it gently – the community where Emmett Till was lynched and the area where SNCC was organizing Freedom Summers. https://www.propublica.org/article/ghosts-of-greenwood Dad was later full of memories and reminiscences about negotiating with the town leaders, as Baldwin would be operating with an integrated workforce and hiring local blacks in its factory. I never heard why they selected Greenwood, Miss. for the new Baldwin plant.
I think we were taught that racism was a Southern disease not applicable in the North; we were in for a shock.
Lucien Wulsin
8/29/20