Public education in America has always been fraught with battle and strife. In theory, communities want their children to be educated, but the issue of money is often at odds with the need for learning. In the early decades of the nation, children were very much needed for labor, and families rebelled against high taxes needed to fund schools. The English High School of Boston was founded in 1821 as the first high school in America. It took support from a state charitable organization to bring it into existence. Little attention was paid to educating blacks, and what their legitimacy meant to the nation. Though it was hoped the presence of Homer Plessy would have the opposite effect throughout the nation, his life only deepened the grief of the black community in its quest for equality.
In the summer of 1892, Plessy, a Louisiana Creole considered black under Louisiana law, boarded a train in New Orleans. He took a seat in the “white carriage,” was summarily arrested (in keeping with Louisiana’s Separate Car Act), and eventually was brought before a judge. His attorneys argued that the Fourteenth Amendment protected him from such segregationist practices. Judge John H. Ferguson ruled against Plessy and his legal team. The next step was an appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which allowed Plessy to take his case to the United States Supreme Court.
The Plessy decision was finally issued in 1896. Associate Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote the court’s decision, which proved fateful to a large segment of the population. A part of Brown’s court ruling read: “The most common instance of this [state-sanctioned separation of the races] is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which has been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of States where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced.” The decision was rife with doom for black constitutional rights, not to mention a complete ignoring of the Fourteenth Amendment. Now a policy of racial segregation had been constitutionally pounded into the law. From city to rural hamlet, the nation had now been presented a green light to discriminate against its black citizens. No facet of black life was immune to the capricious ruling. Associate Justice Brown had twisted the meaning of “equality.” He went on: “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”
Given a metaphorical inch, the court took a mile with its gaze onto black life and rights. The justices all but blamed millions of blacks for their second-class citizenship. The ruling was startling for its mendacity. But there was a dissent, and it was powerful. It was written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, a native of Kentucky who had once owned slaves. During the post–Civil War era he had seen the viciousness meted out to blacks, and it had turned both his mind and heart. In his dissent he predicted that the Plessy ruling would unleash terrifying waves of discrimination in the nation: “If laws of like character should be enacted in the several States of the Union, the effect would be in the highest degree mischievous. Slavery, as an institution tolerated by law would, it is true, have disappeared from our country, but there would remain a power in the States, by sinister legislation, to interfere with the full enjoyment of the blessings of freedom to regulate civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race, and to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens.”
After the Plessy decision the ladder that could lead to freedom for blacks grew painfully crooked and minus the kind of steps that could lead to progress. Without freedom of movement and protection by the judiciary, it was certainly more difficult for blacks to reach the desired plateaus of education. But even deeper than education—the be-all and end-all for black advancement—the Plessy decision psychologically touched American life on a day-to-day basis. Blacks must drink here, not there; must live here, not there; must go to the side window of that restaurant, not the front door.
Ohio may not have seen the gothic and bloody racial dramas that long took place in the American South, but the state had its own warped racial construct. In 1804 the state of Ohio took away most of the rights of blacks. The state implemented a decree that blacks had to cough up a $500 bond just to enter the state to reside. The sum was out of the question for nearly all black people. Runaway slaves fleeing the Kentucky border area of Cincinnati, however, found a haven farther north in Columbus, where there was an active Underground Railroad operation. When black voting rights finally arrived in 1870, joy was palpable in the black community. The city’s ward-based political machinery meant that the East Side would have black political representation. This voting movement gave rise to the brief political career of Rev. James Poindexter, who knew the sacred importance of education to blacks. “No people ever attached greater value to education than do the colored people,” he wrote. “They are more worried about their ignorance than about their poverty. They feel slavery, in depriving them of the means of education, inflicted upon them greater wrong than it did in working 200 years without pay.”
But then things happened that further deepened the misery of blacks and their quest for equal education in the city. The first involved William Oxley Thompson, president of Ohio State University, the most powerful institution in the city. The school was growing at a rapid pace, and the words and pronouncements spoken by its president were given much attention and respect. Thompson was not only president of the university; he was also a member of the Columbus school board. No one on the board wished to go against the university president when he declared, “It is in the best interests of both [races] that they be educated in separate schools.”
Those words were all it took to begin the political revamping of the city’s school system, separating blacks from the white schools they had been attending without much debate or white backlash. School districts began to be gerrymandered to create all-black schools. Blacks didn’t swallow the upheaval quietly. They gathered in a skating rink on Mount Vernon Avenue to criticize the Ohio State University president and his position. Black parents clearly saw the oncoming creation of all-black schools and lamented their powerlessness to stop it from happening. “Such separation of the races, even if the laws of the State did not forbid it,” they wrote in a resolution, “always results ultimately in inferior school equipment for colored children, and, moreover, tends to set the races farther and farther apart, and so to hinder that mutual sympathy and understanding which close personal contact in the plastic years of childhood helps to cultivate.” The resolution fell on deaf ears.
President Thompson’s decision on separate schools was made manifest as the city opened Champion Junior High School in 1909, where Eddie Ratleff, Larry Walker, and several other East High players on the 1968–69 team would come to attend many years later. It was the initial salvo that opened the door to a segregated school system. By 1922 the city added more grades to Champion, enlarging the school to accommodate more black students. The momentum kept up. By 1943 the city had five schools earmarked for blacks—Pilgrim, Felton, Garfield, Mount Vernon, and Champion. Black high-school-age students were sent to East High; some ended up downtown at Central High, located in a notoriously impoverished area. (It hardly went unnoticed that in 1912 the city had moved to at-large elections, also dooming black political clout for the next fifty years. In an at-large election, the outcome favors the majority white population even as blacks are robustly represented in a segregated part of a city. “The Negroes,” a local chronicler would observe shortly after the turn of the century, “are almost completely outside the pale of the white people’s sympathy.”) Ironically, shortly before Champion opened, the very first junior high school in the nation had also opened in 1909 in Columbus. It was Indianola Junior High School, the junior high that Bo-Pete Lamar later attended.
The city of Columbus suffered mightily in forging its identity. It was a landlocked city; unlike Cleveland or Cincinnati, there were no waterways that served as shipping ports to allow for the exporting and importing of goods. The city did not grow like other industrial cities such as Detroit and Pittsburgh. Real estate and banking became the main engines of the Columbus economy. Absent the tide of immigrants that had peopled the Rust Belt cities, Columbus had to concern itself with the largest group of minorities in the city, and they were black. There were no professional sports teams—football, basketball, baseball—in the city, and that is exactly the way the conservative power brokers in the city liked it. In their limited imaginations, they had convinced themselves pro sports might bring vice. Their athletic appetites were filled by the activities at Ohio State University. Some professors quipped that the school spent more for manure (for its agricultural programs) than it did for literature.
Despite its provincialism, a media empire grew in the city. It was created by the Wolfe family, who brooked no opposition to their arch-conservatism. Harry and Robert Wolfe started the Wolfe Brothers Shoe Company in the 1890s. As the family’s profits grew, so did their empire. They later owned TV stations and the city’s dominant newspaper, The Columbus Dispatch, which became their flagship possession. Its reporters were white, often homegrown, and usually plucked from Ohio State University. No politician could rise in the city without the editorial backing of the Dispatch. “Directly and indirectly,” a chronicler of the family’s dealings would write, “the Wolfes exerted unchallenged, if not unquestioned, authority over civic affairs in Columbus from the turn of the century to the onset of World War II, acting primarily on the premise that what was good for Columbus was good for the family and vice versa.”
In 1952, a series of school desegregation cases brought by Thurgood Marshall, the chief legal counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, based in New York City, started to wend its way to the United States Supreme Court. The plaintiffs hailed from Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Marshall and his team of lawyers were attempting nothing less than to bring about the collapse of the Plessy court decision issued decades earlier that had disenfranchised blacks nationwide. The distinguished white lawyers representing the southern states told the court that upending segregation would destabilize a way of life, possibly putting America’s long-term stability at risk. Thurgood Marshall, who had made half a dozen trips to Columbus, Ohio, before his arguments in front of the high court, got to the point quickly during his Brown desegregation presentation, telling the court that children who played on the streets together—and did not do so in one another’s company—certainly would not wither in one another’s presence inside a school building. He leaned further into that position by mentioning the same results would likely occur were they to be sitting beside one another in college or university classrooms.
Following the Brown argument, Justice Felix Frankfurter, an impish and brilliant Supreme Court justice, wrote a memo to himself—a form of thinking aloud on paper, which he often did. This memo bit into America’s racial history with insight: “The outcome of the Civil War, as reflected in the Civil War Amendments, is that there is a single American society. Our colored citizens, like the other components which make up the American nation, are not to be denied the right to enjoy the distinctive qualities of their cultural past. But neither are they to be denied the right to grow up with other Americans as part of our national life. And experience happily shows that contacts tend to mitigate antagonisms and engender mutual respect.”
In the immediate aftermath of the NAACP arguments, Chief Justice Fred Vinson died of a heart attack. President Eisenhower appointed former California governor Earl Warren as chief justice. Whereas Vinson had been skittish about taking on racially charged cases, Warren looked forward to it. On May 17, 1954, the high court issued its decision, striking down Plessy and sending a titanic ruling out across the nation. “We conclude unanimously,” Chief Justice Warren said, “that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” (Warren personally inserted the word “unanimously” to emphasize the strength of the decision.) Black communities rejoiced, even as southern politicians excoriated the ruling. The foundation of legal discrimination—on paper at least—had been cracked open and proven illegal. The news reached foreign shores and their publications. The psychological and legal impact of the ruling was one thing; the implementation of it was quite another. Warren knew as much, and foresaw that the implementation would be incremental. His ruling took into account that there would be attorneys general in the states who would need to appear before the court and iron out how the ruling pertained to their jurisdiction. Some school districts fitfully adapted, but most did not. Virginia shut down many of its schools. Some schools needed the intervention of federal troops. For years, the American educational system remained in flux, bedeviled by the issue of race.
There were precious few blacks who rose in city governments throughout America during the days of lawful segregation. During the 1940s and 1950s, there were no black mayors or police chiefs in any major American city; the mere idea would have been unthinkable. Segregation had rooted itself deeply in the grain of America. There were, however, small cracks beginning in the early 1960s. Here and there could be seen a black assistant city attorney, a black assistant prosecutor, a black municipal juvenile court judge. These individuals often hailed from esteemed colleges and universities. They were not radical in any sense of the word and had mostly kept a distance from those so-called radical blacks who were demanding rights by sitting in at lunch counters. They were also, more often than not, light of skin. The skin issue was a peculiar but noticeable dynamic: White America seemed to feel more comfortable around lighter-skinned blacks than darker-skinned blacks. The roots of this psychological reality could be traced to the days of slavery, when the “field slaves” were often darker-skinned and the so-called “house Negros”—who got easier work—were often light-skinned. The Negro press wrote about the conundrum, but with a light and almost nervous touch.
In Columbus, Ohio, in the 1950s, a young black man began to rise into the upper echelons of the most coveted jobs in the city. Whites embraced him; he was well-educated with his law degree—and he was also quite light of skin. He was a Republican, which also fit in with the city’s white power structure. His name was Robert Duncan. Why, many whites would excitedly say at certain gatherings, here comes Bobby Duncan! He had been accepted.
There would come a day when Bobby Duncan would teach this city a cold and hard lesson about segregation.
The city of Columbus, to stanch overcrowding, built new schools all right, but they were in white areas. In the 1950s, enrollment in the Columbus school system exploded by 87 percent. But black school construction nearly halted, and black schools became overcrowded while remaining underfunded. The Vanguard League, which had been counted upon to bring the grievances of blacks to City Hall, disbanded. There were whispers—never proven—of Communist influence. Anna Mae Durham, a Columbus activist in the 1950s, was disheartened by the white school board’s inaction on behalf of black students. “There wasn’t any effort by the school board to follow Brown,” she said of the Supreme Court ruling.
Since public schools, especially segregated black schools, had to scuffle for both money and respect, it fell to the local black community to support their own schools. “There were ‘black schools’ and ‘Columbus schools,’ ” said Ted Turner, an administrator within the black school system who attended downtown Columbus school board meetings and was peeved at the disinterest shown on behalf of black schools. The widest and deepest areas of the city’s black population took in East Long Street, went up and down Mount Vernon Avenue, and included several blocks of East Broad Street. East High School was the nexus of it all, and many were willing, across the years, to wage battles on behalf of the school. To fortify themselves, the black community created its own world around the schools. The black nightclubs and theaters were on Mount Vernon Avenue. More clubs and haberdasheries were located on Long Street, parallel to Mount Vernon Avenue.
In 1948, Dr. Watson Walker arrived in Columbus from Georgia. Like many others, he came north looking for opportunity. Not a single white hospital in Columbus would hire him. He finally found employment putting his medical skills to use, but it was downtown at the Ohio State Penitentiary, a notorious place of confinement that had once housed Civil War prisoners. (In later years members of bank robber John Dillinger’s gang were imprisoned there.) Beans and fatback bacon were staples of the prisoners’ diet.
Dr. Walker ingratiated himself with the local black community over the years. In 1961, he got himself elected to the school board. The story of his election was noteworthy enough to wind up in the pages of Jet magazine, the widely read, pocket-sized national magazine that had highlighted Emmett Till’s Chicago funeral. As soon as he made it onto the board, Walker made it his main mission to look out for the needs of East High School. And one of the things that had been upsetting the black parents of East High students for years was the fact that the football field did not have night lights—when all the other schools in the city did. “I knew this was one of the things the black community was incensed about,” Walker would recall. “They had been working on it for years and had been rebuffed at every turn. The only reason [white board members] didn’t want lights for East was the white schools would prefer to play East at daytime because they figured if they came out in the east end at nighttime they were going to get beat up. These were prevalent racial attitudes that had to be erased.” School board members intimated that lights were a luxury at any high school, choosing to drop the matter. Walker decided to launch an investigation. He got sleuths to help him out. At a subsequent board meeting, he produced his findings. “How many schools with football fields do you have that are not lighted?” he asked board members. They grew agitated by his line of inquiry. But it was a board meeting and someone was compelled to answer. “One,” a white member finally answered, confessing that the school was East High. The public revelation finally forced the school system to install lights on the football field at East High School.
By the time of East High’s 1968–69 athletic season, a few black newspapers in the community had folded. The surviving newspaper was the Columbus Call and Post. It was located in a three-story Victorian home set off East Broad Street, on Hamilton Avenue. Amos Lynch, the editor of the paper, had grown up around newspapering. Lynch’s mother, Beadie, was a self-taught journalist for the Columbus Advocate, a local black newspaper published in the years before World War II. Beadie preferred taking phone calls about story tips and ideas; she considered the grunge work of newspapering out on the streets beneath her. So she’d send her young son, Amos, out to do the shoe-leather work, interviewing people and getting the color for her story. He’d bring the quotes back to his mom, and she’d shape and write the story.
Young Amos enrolled at Ohio State University, intent on becoming a journalist. But World War II interrupted his education in his freshman year. He became a Navy corpsman, fortunate in that he never got close to battle, spending his military service between New York and Illinois, tending to injured soldiers. Back home in 1946—more mature, energetic as ever, and still a fool for journalism—he resumed his education at Ohio State. But he found himself awash in freelance newspaper work, which made him an inattentive student. He left school for good and went to work for the Ohio Sentinel, focusing on the rise of the black community, its population constantly growing after World War II. More than a few black servicemen who had exhibited special flying skills during World War II settled on the city’s East Side after the war. Their renown as Tuskegee Airmen was still decades away from being celebrated.
While covering a football game at all-black Wilberforce University in 1947 (the great W. E. B. DuBois had once been on the faculty) for his newspaper, Lynch met a young lady, Geraldine, and began courting her. She loved his intensity and how he always seemed to have his ear to the drumbeat of the black community. They soon married. A few years later he went on to help start the Ohio State News, yet another black newspaper. It had nothing to do with Ohio State University; the use of the school’s name was seen as a marketing edge. The university didn’t seem to mind.
Amos Lynch was often heard before he was seen: His voice was gravelly and had a bark to it. His skin was cinnamon-colored, and his mouth was constantly moving because of the chewing gum he was always smacking on. Like many black newspaper editors of the time, Lynch was shameless in advocating for his community. This was life-and-death journalism—at least that was how Amos Lynch approached the job. It was community survival. In 1955, when the idea was hatched to create the Mount Vernon Avenue District Improvement Association, Lynch quickly jumped in. He knew just who would make a great publicity director: He would! The business owners accepted his suggestion. There was a formal ceremony, and a city official administered the oath of office to members of the group—three men and a woman at the time—as they all raised their right hands and posed for a photograph.
There were certain names from the civil rights movement in the South that were starting to reach the ears of the black populace of Columbus. On December 1, 1955—not long after Thurgood Marshall’s NAACP school desegregation victory—Rosa Parks refused to abandon her seat in the white section of that Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Her arrest set off a year-long and steadfast bus boycott that ignited other marches and protest movements. The civil rights genie was permanently out of the bottle. Rev. Phale Hale had started inviting the young Martin Luther King Jr. to Columbus. Ann Walker, who got her start writing under Amos Lynch for another publication, was asked by a local TV station to interview King in 1956. The station had no blacks on its reporting staff. Walker knew the King family and jumped at the opportunity. “His wife was a friend of my husband,” she says of Coretta Scott King, who accompanied her minister husband to the city. “He wasn’t as well known at the time,” Walker says of King. “I asked him questions about the Montgomery bus boycott, and about his general plans for blacks across the country.”
In 1962, his squabbling with superiors and his aggressive nature eventually got Lynch fired from the Ohio State News, but he wasn’t idle for too long. Lynch was asked to open a local edition of the Cleveland Call and Post, one of the largest black weeklies in the nation. It was making money, so their owners decided to open the Columbus Call and Post. By the time Amos Lynch took that paper’s helm, he had contacts throughout the city and had attained a reputation of respect across the color line. Among the main issues he aimed to focus on were the school integration effort, the battle for fair housing, and the goings-on over at East High School. He had a small staff—three reporters and a managing editor—and worked them to the bone. The hours were long and the idea of overtime pay for the reporters was laughable. Stories about local black crime—murderous affairs and the like—drew wide readership. There were times Lynch was criticized for getting mighty close to a form of tabloid journalism. But he knew the salacious stories would pull readers in, and then they’d notice the serious stories! There were also stories about Hollywood celebrities and singers—Lou Rawls, Dinah Washington, Big Mama Thornton, Nancy Wilson—who passed through town to perform. If Harry Belafonte or Sammy Davis Jr. or Eartha Kitt appeared on some TV variety show or television movie, there’d be a big splashy spread about them inside the pages of the Call and Post.
Few things, however, made Lynch as proud as uplifting stories about East High School. While he himself had attended South High, he realized the following East High had in the city. Issues of the newspaper sold speedily when there were stories about the school: stories about football, basketball, baseball games; stories about those East High state championship seasons; stories about the vaunted marching band that was getting invitations to march on college campuses; stories about his good friend Mayme Moore, the local businesswoman who had been invited in 1963 by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Washington to join him on the dais where he made his unforgettable speech; stories about Jack Gibbs being named the first black principal of East High School. Amos Lynch turned himself into a big man around town. And like so many others, he became an East High Tiger booster. The school was the community.
It was the community where Harvey Alston Sr. lived. Alston graduated from East High in 1925. In 1937, he joined the Columbus police force. Black patrolmen found it almost impossible to climb the ranks. In 1943, black officer Leslie Shaw filed a lawsuit, won, and got promoted. And when Harvey Alston got promoted to police captain in 1952, the Negro press around the country made sure to cover the story.
Amos Lynch told groups his newspaper could not survive were it not for the keen minds and savvy business skills of merchants up and down Mount Vernon Avenue. The reason was simple: They placed ads in his newspaper, and ads were revenue! There were certainly bigger and fancier stores on North High Street in downtown Columbus, but they didn’t cater to the black community. Their items were often more expensive, although often of higher quality. Although Columbus had relaxed its policies about blacks trying on clothes and hat wear before the cities in the American South had done so, blacks in town still felt many of those downtown stores were off-putting and snooty.
To walk from one end of Mount Vernon Avenue to the other was to get a sense of a whole other thriving business district, separate from the main downtown shopping district in the city. Ernest Mackey worked as a salesman at Spicer’s Furniture Store on Mount Vernon Avenue. There was a big awning above the store, which protruded out over the avenue. Charles Spicer was owner of the store, but it was Mackey whom many customers revered, so much so that they treated him as if he were the owner. And that was because Mr. Mackey—as he was always called—would take care of you: He’d put something in layaway—keeping it for you longer than initially agreed upon if he had to—and let you keep paying on it until you could complete the purchase. He’d mark an item lower on the spot if he saw you were short the advertised price; he’d even find a couple of handymen to transport that couch—for free—to your home or apartment.
Not far from Spicer’s was Edna Bryce’s Floral Shop. Bryce was a native of Alabama, a fine-boned thin woman who had a sense of churchy grace. She held teas and taught etiquette classes out of her home. Her floral business grew steadily in the 1950s. She supplied flowers for funerals, weddings, union hall events. She became so highly respected she rose, in time, to become president of the Mount Vernon Avenue District Improvement Association. Jack Gibbs of East High adored her. Those corsages for the girls attending the Rainbow Ball at East High? They came from Mrs. Bryce’s Floral Shop. Amos Lynch also depended on Edna Bryce to keep his newspaper informed about society news—which local black son or daughter had spent a holiday in California, which local family member was striking out for the wicked world of entertainment in New York City. She was nosy, but not gossipy; proud, but not arrogant.
Every community needs a go-to lawyer. On Mount Vernon Avenue it was William A. Toler. (The “A” stood for Adolph, a quite uncommon name, middle or otherwise, for a black child.) A product of the West Virginia coal mines, he wanted to become a lawyer. The state of West Virginia thought it was a noble idea, as long as he didn’t wish to go to law school in West Virginia. As was the custom of many southern states and their segregated law schools, West Virginia paid for blacks in their state to go to law school elsewhere. Toler graduated from Ohio State University and, afterwards, decided to remain in the city. There was service in World War II; he came home with medals. Within minutes in his company, it was hard to forget him and the sidelong stares began: He stood five-foot-five, had both a temper and a Napoleonic complex, and dazzled people with his IQ of 141. His small law practice, which he started in the late 1940s, was quite active. As with many personal attorneys, some of his clients were of questionable morals. He handled the cases of pimps, thieves, and prostitutes. Because of his size, his clients thought they could take advantage of him. But he often shocked them by throwing the first punch, rearing back again for the follow-up punch, following that with wild-eyed glaring and cursing. His wife, Toni, had had him admitted to mental hospitals more than once. Walking from mental hospital to car, he’d tell his wife that he was fine, that his brief stay had actually calmed him down. Toni got used to it. When he had to, Jack Gibbs would hit William Toler up for free legal advice.
There was only one photographer like Gordon Parks, the famous Life magazine staffer who had become the most celebrated black photographer in America in the 1950s. George Pierce was the Gordon Parks of the East Side of Columbus. A native of Alabama, he had long fancied becoming a photographer. When he founded his own studio on Mount Vernon Avenue in the 1950s, his dream came true. People would see him hustling out of the studio to his car, his cameras swinging from around his neck. He photographed the NAACP marches—there was a huge one on the statehouse lawn in 1959—and he photographed celebratory parades, crime scenes, events at East High School, and Martin Luther King Jr. when he came to town. When President Lyndon Johnson came to Columbus after having signed one of his landmark civil rights bills, Pierce hustled out to the airport. He had to be a little aggressive with the media horde because he had to get into a good position and get his doggone pictures; he would tell anyone who would listen that LBJ had freed the black race. And when he got his pictures, he nearly wept. He revered LBJ.
These were among some of the men and women who had carte blanche to come visit Amos Lynch, the Call and Post editor. Any one of them could climb the stairs to the second floor of the converted house, where the tiny newsroom sat, and be invited to pull out a chair and unload their concerns and sentiments about the community. The dining-room-cum-newsroom could instantly take on a salon atmosphere. (When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, it was as if the creaky front door of the house never stopped swinging open and shut.) If Hiram Tanner or John Combs, the reporters, weren’t on deadline—it was a weekly, the deadlines were every five days—the gabfests could go on for hours. Tanner covered sports. A native of Arkansas, he was a large man and shambled as he walked. He was old enough to have remembered, in detail, the odyssey of Jackie Robinson as he broke the color barrier in professional baseball, as well as the best fights of Joe Louis and Jersey Joe Walcott, some of which he covered for other Negro publications. Ohio State coach Woody Hayes would always try to make time for him, knowing that Tanner had different deadlines and different story angles for his readers. Sometimes Amos Lynch, whose office was on the first floor of the converted living room, would climb the stairs and interrupt Tanner in the middle of one of his long monologues, and Tanner would roll his eyes, two gruff men in the middle of the make-do newsroom staring like bulls until Tanner finally turned in the direction of the manual Smith-Corona typewriter on his desk. Amos Lynch had a newspaper to get out, and the printing press folks up in Cleveland, where the paper was actually printed, would start riding him as deadlines approached.
As the 1968–69 basketball season at East High had gotten under way, Hiram Tanner was calling friends around the country, telling them that he had never seen a trio like Eddie Ratleff, Nick Conner, and Bo-Pete Lamar at the high school level. On game days he’d shamble around the Fairgrounds Coliseum during East High’s games, an old black reporter who couldn’t break the color barrier in newspapers like Jackie Robinson had done in baseball. He wore thick glasses and couldn’t always make out the people who called his name out—“Hey Tanner!”—so he’d just wave his forearm. Hiram Tanner was quite happy in this black world within Columbus.
Whereas Tanner was voluble, another Call and Post writer, the pipe-smoking John Combs, was pensive and rather quiet. His pipe smoke filled the office with a sweet aroma, and pipe ash covered his desk and flecked his clothing as if dusty snow had fallen. His reporting skills were admired when he was writing about the minutiae of municipal government. But what truly excited him was writing about crimes of passion and the horrors of sex crimes. In 1952, when he was writing for the Ohio State News, Combs got hold of what he felt was his most gripping and sensational story yet.
Betty Butler, petite and beautiful, a resident of Cleveland, Ohio, had married young and given birth to two children. But the marriage crumbled and she left Cleveland, settling in Cincinnati. She met a local woman, Evelyn Clark, who showed more than a casual interest in getting to know the young divorcée. Clark was a lesbian. Butler was out of money and in the city all alone. She felt vulnerable. Clark offered to help her financially, provided the two could become lovers. It was a brief and tumultuous affair; there were arguments, a lot of drinking and partying. On September 6, 1952, while the two were out in a rowboat at Sharon Woods, not far from Cincinnati, an argument erupted. Deezie Ivory, a third member of the boating party—and the one who had been rowing—quickly brought the boat back to shore, the voices of the two women ringing in his ears. Once on shore, an enraged Butler grabbed a handkerchief and began to strangle Clark, who lapsed into unconsciousness. Ivory stood motionless, shocked, his eyes darting about, up and down the shoreline. Butler dragged Clark to the water’s edge and proceeded to drown her. Some nearby fishermen watched the whole thing unfold, too far away to render immediate help. Park rangers were alerted and arrested Butler.
The murder trial was swift: a black woman, a lesbian affair, the year 1952 when such a thing was genuinely taboo. Butler was sentenced to death and was sent to the Marysville Women’s Penitentiary. There were three appeals, all for naught. Her execution was finally set for June 11, 1954, to take place in Columbus, at the Ohio State Penitentiary, which housed the electric chair. She was a quiet prisoner. She learned to sketch drawings while awaiting her fate, lamenting that she hadn’t had enough focus in life to become an artist. Her last meal was simple: eggs with cheese, apricots on the side. John Combs, the Call and Post reporter, got into the penitentiary on the execution date. He couldn’t get over how beautiful Betty Butler was. On her date with the electric chair, she was dressed in a pink-and-black dress and wore Oxford shoes. She had a rosary in her hand, having converted to Catholicism while in prison. As she began her walk to the electric chair, two female guards took her by the arm, fearing she might faint. Butler snatched her arms away. She seemed fearless, and her courage made Combs shudder with awe. Outside the walls of the penitentiary, after it was all over, making his way to his office, Combs couldn’t shake the image of a stoic—and still beautiful—Betty Butler slowly walking to the chair. In his story Combs pulled a line from the poet William Cullen Bryant to describe Butler’s final steps—“the majesty of her death.” He was mighty proud of that literary touch. On that day in 1954 when Combs’s story on the death of Betty Butler was published in the Ohio State News, the vendors on Mount Vernon Avenue sold the paper at a rapid clip.
So this was the street in Middle America that the black citizenry of Columbus called “Our Town.” It was on Mount Vernon Avenue where Bo-Pete Lamar’s mother shopped, and where Larry Walker’s mother shopped with her maid’s earnings; and where Robert Wright’s mother purchased her sweet potatoes from Carl Brown’s grocery after her back-bending maid’s work; and where Kenny Mizelle’s mother bought her children’s school clothes from her government check or her intermittent maid’s work as well. And it was off to Mount Vernon Avenue where Jack Gibbs went when he needed money for new athletic equipment for his segregated school, or money for an important college trip for his students, or money for one of those esteem-building Rainbow Balls he was holding at the school. It was on Mount Vernon Avenue where pictures of the 1968–69 East High Tigers basketball team adorned so many storefronts, taking window space alongside the portraits of the slain Martin Luther King Jr.
The news that coursed through black America onto the pages of the black press in the 1960s—stories of faith and triumph, but also of martyred deaths—was reaching beyond the black community of Columbus. Some whites in the city began to recognize the massive and deep dishonesty of segregation, and to realize that the city was being harmed by it. Nancy Jeffrey was the wife of Tad Jeffrey, whose great-grandfather had founded the Jeffrey Company, one of the coal manufacturing plants that served as a magnet for blacks to leave the South and go to Columbus. Nancy Jeffrey spoke her mind when it came to civil rights. “People have always said to me, ‘Why do you have strong feelings about race?’ We had two black women who ran our house. I was the youngest of five. They formed my character. I adored them like family. I’ve always thought black women salvaged the character of people—and got no adulation for it.” She grew up around wealth in Irvington-on-Hudson in Westchester County, New York. “I had a different outlook on the world than most [white people] who grew up here,” she says of Columbus.
She and her husband arrived in Columbus in 1956 and moved into the white enclave of Bexley—on East Broad Street, the same street as East High, but also a world away. “The discrimination was accepted in Columbus,” she says of the times. “It was the accepted rule in the homes of the white leaders. And people didn’t want to be seen running concurrent to that. But I came from the East Coast.” She became part of the United Community Council, a social service organization in the city that battled discrimination. They wrote a memorandum about needed health services that could be provided by the five settlement houses in the city. One of the authors was Bernie Wohl—Jewish, liberal, brave. Born in New York City, Wohl came to Columbus in 1961 to become director of one of those settlement houses. Four years later he joined the faculty at Ohio State University, teaching social work. On a campus with very few progressive voices, he stood out. “The rumor was that Wohl had a printing press that printed Communist materials,” says Jeffrey of unproven gossip that tarnished Wohl’s reputation among the conservative crowd in the city. (By 1972 Wohl had had enough of Columbus and returned to his native New York City, where he became the highly respected director of the Goddard Riverside Community Center.) Nevertheless, Jeffrey took the United Community Council’s memorandum about needed health services to The Columbus Dispatch newspaper, hoping they would run a story. The Dispatch did not. “They wouldn’t have any part of printing our social agenda,” says Jeffrey. “J. Walter Wolfe [a family heir] didn’t want anyone messing with his sleepy town. And Ohio State University wasn’t rocking any boats. It was the women these businessmen brought to Columbus with them that loosened the ice” among whites, Jeffrey says.
Mary Lazarus was yet another of those white women. She came to Columbus in 1953 with her family from Connecticut. Before coming to Columbus she had worked in New York City for the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students. The fund identified gifted high school students in the South and found scholarship money for them to attend northern schools. Her husband, Robert Lazarus, hailed from the family that had founded Lazarus, the big downtown Columbus department store. “The city was pretty segregated,” she remembers of Columbus at the time. “It was stagnant.”
The Lazarus family also lived in Bexley, right off East Broad. “East Broad Street was the dividing line,” she says about the city’s racial dynamic. She also sat proudly on the board of the United Community Council. “I thought it was kind of our way of addressing the issues of race and the community’s well-being.” When National Urban League president Whitney Young came to Columbus, Mary and Robert hosted a dinner for him at their home. But there were simply too few like-minded whites to make effective change. The powerful Wolfe media empire held a grip on the city’s politics that was proving impossible to loosen: “The Wolfes were terribly conservative and reactionary. That was the tone of the newspaper. We were very disgusted with the Dispatch’s editorials,” she says. “They were very influential.”
Bert Kram, a young lawyer who arrived in Columbus in 1966 from Chicago, was no stranger to urban education. But he was surprised at how segregated the Columbus school system was. Kram worked at the Bricker & Bricker law firm, one of the oldest firms in the city. He took his lunch at the downtown Athletic Club, like other successful white men in the city. When he and others wanted to have John Bowen, a black state representative in the Ohio legislature, join them for lunch, they were rebuffed. “The Athletic Club was not accepting blacks,” he says. So the members who sided with Bowen began taking their lunch at the nearby Neil House Hotel. In 1968, following the death of Martin Luther King Jr., a group of attorneys, Kram and attorney Fred Isaac among them, went to the Columbus Symphony with an idea: They wanted the symphony to host a series of free concerts around the city—“tensions were very high in the city,” he says—and make their concern known to the black East Side of town. “It had never been done before,” Kram says of the proposal. The symphony officials liked the idea. They went to see East High principal Jack Gibbs. And Gibbs, being Gibbs, suggested they rehearse at East High, which they did. The concert was held in Franklin Park, just across the street from Gibbs’s school. There was talk among concertgoers of King’s life and the direction of the nation now. Symphonic music swept across the park. There was the mingling of black and white. For many whites in the city, it was the first racial mix they had witnessed aside from sports events that took place at neutral sites. Franklin Park was decidedly on the black side of town. The two worlds of East Broad Street, if only for a moment, came together.
But Ohio State University and the city’s black East Side had a difficult time in coming together. The few notable blacks on the campus through the years had been athletes, and of that paltry number most had come from East High. It was as if the university were saying to the city’s black East Side: Send us the best of the best of your athletes, but not your scholars and students seeking higher education. It wasn’t until the tumult of 1968–69 that the university hired its first black administrator. His name was Madison Scott, and he was soon heading up their Office of Minority Affairs. He got more than he imagined upon taking the job; he was under constant siege by the round-the-clock protests about the widespread racial insensitivity throughout the campus. When a group of students was charged with felonies for taking over the administration building as part of their protest, the rancor only increased. Eventually, most of the charges were dropped, but the Ohio State administration seemed not to realize the depth of the spreading anger. They expected praise for bringing Earl Scarborough—the artist given modern credit for coining the “black is beautiful” phrase—to campus. But the protesting students were interested in political undertakings, not bestowing hosannas upon Earl Scarborough and his artistic coinage.
If Columbus was so conservative, how did it, in 1954, come to elect a Democratic mayor, M. E. (Jack) Sensenbrenner, and keep electing him all through the 1960s? (The city before then hadn’t elected a Democratic mayor since the Great Depression.) And how come this Democratic mayor never was able to alter the political cast of the city? Why did he allow its segregationist mind-set to prevail for so long? The reasons for Sensenbrenner’s rise varied, but it could be traced to his nonthreatening demeanor and the power of the banking and real estate barons who actually ran the small city. Sensenbrenner turned his leadership on racial matters into a kind of vaudeville shtick—understandable, as he had once tried to make a go of it in Hollywood. “It’s a bad town for a football coach,” the Saturday Evening Post would opine about the city in 1952, “but a good place for a politician.” In that article, there was not one reference made to the black populace of Columbus, or the strains of segregation.
Jack Sensenbrenner was born in 1902 in a little farm town, Circleville, thirty miles outside of Columbus. In secondary school he was a cutup; teachers had to grab him by the ears plenty of times. It was a dream of his to make the Circleville High football team, something on offense, maybe split end. He ended up becoming the water boy. When the family made its way to Columbus after his high school years, they settled on the city’s West Side. In those days, only the moneyed class were able to send their kids to college, and the Sensenbrenner family did not come from money, so Jack hit the open road, all the way to sunny California. He took some Bible college courses, thinking he might become a minister, but never completed the course load. He was skinny, had big dark eyebrows, and was quick to smile. California was mesmerizing, and it seemed wide open. He worked in oil fields, then sold ads for the Los Angeles Times. He reconnected with Mildred Sexhauer—he had fun pronouncing her last name—who had been his high school sweetheart. At heart he was a rube, and not at all ashamed of it. Mildred actually liked that trait about him. He went job to job, even laughed his way around the outskirts of Hollywood when he got work as an extra in movies. But in time they both decided to return to Columbus.
There were low-end civil service jobs, but they didn’t really hold Jack Sensenbrenner’s interest. He started to make a name for himself when he opened a store on the city’s West Side, where he sold Bibles and religious knickknacks—a grinning Bible salesman. Knocking about the community in a straw skimmer hat, he handed out miniature American flags to children and strangers. The patriotic fervor from World War II still hung heavily in the air. The Kiwanis Club leadership, sensing his conviviality and fondness for interacting with the public, invited him to join, and he did. When he announced he was running for mayor in 1954, people laughed, including members of his own family. The GOP faction in the city was bickering internally that year, and while they were, Sensenbrenner went on TV, a novel move, and people recognized him as the guy always handing out flags around town, always stopping people in parks and chatting them up. His margin of victory was a mere four hundred votes, but he was on his way to City Hall. During his term in office, he made people laugh; he socialized on Mount Vernon Avenue, made friends with blacks. Some of the hard-core businesspeople wondered if he was a bit “touched” in the head. He lost his re-election bid in 1959; many felt he had bungled the city’s reaction to a local flood. But he won election again in 1964. The white men who ran the city did not pay much attention to Jack Sensenbrenner because he was a kind of mascot, a harmless and grinning cheerleader for the city. “My mother called him ‘Mayor Senseless-brenner,’ ” says basketball star Bo-Pete Lamar.
The flag-bearing mayor was in cahoots with the real estate barons in the city because he backed the annexing of suburban land, and so they supported him. It was a land tactic that kept the segregated neighborhoods segregated. When Sensenbrenner first entered City Hall, the city totaled forty-one square miles. During his years in office he tripled the city’s square miles. So the power brokers kept patting Jack Sensenbrenner on the back. He was making the city money! In 1958, Columbus received an “All-America City Award” from the National League of Cities. But Sensenbrenner wasn’t doing anything to shake up the social order. He never tried to deal with the city’s segregation, or confront the issue of police brutality in the black community. The local black citizenry felt no reason to celebrate the city receiving any kind of award.
But there was something else that certain denizens of the black community celebrated: the numbers-running business. Numbers running was an illegal gambling enterprise that grew out of the Great Depression. In Columbus, the mafia-linked business was run by Frank Baldassaro and Marie Baldassaro, his sister. Jack Gibbs loathed the Baldassaro clan and their kind, but he couldn’t stop their infiltration into the community. Law enforcement officials admitted the Baldassaros had control of more than 80 percent of the community’s betting activities, drawing around $250,000 a week. In 1963, someone placed a bomb in a flower bed outside of Frank Baldassaro’s home. The five family members at home at the time were lucky to escape injury. In 1969—during the East High basketball season—Frank Baldassaro was arrested and charged with having eight Columbus police officers on his payroll. Some of the blowback pointed at Mayor Sensenbrenner, who lacked tight control over his police department. The Baldassaro arrest was a juicy crime story, made all the more dramatic when Baldassaro hired F. Lee Bailey, one of the country’s top criminal defense attorneys, to fight the charges. Bailey won an acquittal for Baldassaro and his co-defendants.
Despite not having a civil rights agenda, Mayor Sensenbrenner received a pass from the black community. The biggest reason was because he championed East High School. He attended its games, bopped into the school when he was in the neighborhood, laughed alongside the students—while handing out those flags—as if the best thing in the world would have been for someone to snap their fingers and transport him back into a high school. He wore his orange Tiger sweater to East High games.
So just like all the East High Tiger fans across the city in February of 1969, Mayor Sensenbrenner was extremely excited about the forthcoming East High–Linden-McKinley tournament matchup scheduled to take place at the Fairgrounds Coliseum.
Jack Sensenbrenner may not have done things in the city to advance the cause of civil rights, but, in their own way, the East High Tigers basketball team did: They were the boys whose pictures appeared on the front page of The Columbus Dispatch in previous years when the basketball team had won state championships. The photos on page one of the newspaper represented the largest number of black faces that had ever appeared on the newspaper’s front page. The photos—above the fold—stunned many readers. But those pictures hadn’t been of black-white racial unrest. They were of glory. And now the Tigers of Bob Hart were trying to repeat that glory.