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.
2
Intervening “in and between Crises”
The 1950s
The 1950s saw important progress toward desegregation at the national level. In Henderson v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated seating on railroad dining cars denied the equal access to public accommodations guaranteed by the Interstate Commerce Act. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the court ruled that public school segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, the court went on to rule that a public institution of higher learning could not treat a student differently because of his or her race. Accompanied by white protests and riots, the University of Alabama became integrated, as did Little Rock Central High School despite interference from Arkansas’s Governor Orval Faubus. The organizational foundation for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was laid in Atlanta. In 1957 the Cincinnati Enquirer published a four-part series on Appalachian migrants in the city; the lead article for the series shared the front page with another article headlined “Civil Rights Pact Is Proposed.”
Even with these signs of progress, however, racial atrocities were still being committed: Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American youth visiting from Chicago, was beaten then shot to death in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi; the two white men charged with his murder were acquitted. Four years later Mack Charles Parker, an African American man accused of raping a white woman, was taken from jail by a mob in Poplarville, Mississippi, and lynched.
. . .
Marshall Bragdon opened the decade by reaffirming
