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
