person as one needing help and education. Also, we realize that most discriminatory customs and arrangements will yield only to gradual but energetic treatment.”
The committee’s prestige would grow throughout the 1950s. Its 1949 annual meeting was attended by about a hundred people, and local news reporters noted those present included no representatives of the judiciary or the police division, only one city council member, a cameo appearance by the mayor, and very few blacks. Notably absent were representatives of the University of Cincinnati, where “the university band was all white, the College of Medicine had not admitted a Negro student in ten years, [and] the school still schedules games with Southern institutions which won’t permit U.C. Negro athletes to play.” But attendance at the 1952 annual meeting grew to 270, and by 1954 the MFRC celebrated its tenth anniversary by sending out seventeen hundred invitations eliciting attendance by delegates from 175 different organizations. The 1956 breakout sessions, which were a longstanding feature of the MFRC’s annual meetings, featured seminars on civil rights, housing, churches, education, recreation, and Southern migrants.
In 1951, Dorothy N. Dolbey, a committee member since 1949, became the first woman to serve as chair of the MFRC, but her service ended after eight months when she resigned to become a Charter Committee candidate for city council. She would go on in the mid-1950s to serve as both vice-mayor and as acting mayor after the death of Mayor Edward Waldvogel. Dolbey was among several Cincinnatians who would use the MFRC and later the CHRC as a platform from which to launch a political career.
Meanwhile the three-person MFRC staff (Marshall Bragdon, Virginia Coffey, and Janet Smith) continued to address racial tensions in neighborhoods, parks, schools, and businesses from the twenty-by-twenty-foot confines of room 105 in City Hall. In this constricted space they met with various committee members, politicians, city administration officials, and citizens with complaints. Even after renovations increased the committee’s office space, the city budget did not allow for additional furniture, so Marshall Bragdon spent several weekends purchasing materials out of his own pocket and building desks for the staff.
Despite space and financial constraints, the MFRC quietly went about its business with the close cooperation of city council member Theodore M. Berry, who would go on to become the city’s first African American mayor. During the 1950s the MFRC adopted a two-pronged approach, working to improve human relations in both the governmental and the private sectors.
On the governmental front the committee successfully argued for integrating the swimming pools operated by the Recreation Commission and by the Cincinnati Public Schools. The MFRC defused the “problems” some feared would come with the hiring of the first black meter reader in the water department. In 1955 the city’s first black firefighter was hired after the committee pointed out that an ordinance forbidding “discrimination in the appointment, promotion and remuneration of city employees” had been on the books for nine years.
Police-community relations remained at the top of the committee’s governmental agenda throughout the decade. The police shooting of an unarmed black youth in Walnut Hills and the wounding of another citizen by a ricocheting bullet resulted in angry protests, but the city manager cleared the officers involved of any wrongdoing. According to Marshall Bragdon, “the MFRC’s report did not make a judgment on that; its emphasis was on the obvious need for better police-citizen interchange, in and between crises.” Some progress was made in this area when Stanley R. Schrotel, formerly of the Race Relations Detail, was named chief of police, and invited Bragdon to lecture each new recruit class for the following six years. In 1957, Chief Schrotel’s picture appeared on the front cover of Life magazine along with an article lauding his department as a “Model Police Force” for the nation.
An incident involving the arrest of women in the West End for disorderly conduct drew crowds of five hundred to a thousand people over a period of two days. Tensions abated after the MFRC helped set up a meeting among black and white stakeholders. But the committee, distracted by other issues, did not follow up on the potential for better police-community relations that resulted. In Bragdon’s words, “We did not build solidly for the long pull.”
The MFRC did step up its in-service training at the police academy, but to little avail. In 1956 a black fifteen-year-old “errant schoolboy” was fatally shot by two police officers after he attacked them with a crowbar. The NAACP took up his case but a grand jury and the police chief exonerated the officers. In 1958 fourteen-year-old Abe Savage Jr. was shot to death by police after joyriding in his father’s car and ignoring three roadblocks. Murder warrants filed by Abe Savage Sr. were dismissed, and the county prosecutor refused to take the case against the officers involved to a grand jury.
The MFRC undertook a study of these and several previous fatal shootings of black citizens by the police. The committee’s findings were made public in a report stating that (1) there was no evidence of racial discrimination on the part of the police; (2) police officers were generally exercising good judgment; and (3) police procedures, training, and supervision were adequate. Marshall Bragdon summed up the committee’s stance: “Evaluating the whole Abe Savage controversy, we have no doubt that it brought upon MFRC and its director sharp criticism and hostility from some quarters, and approbation from others . . . errors [were] made, but the community was somewhat better equipped to deal with the next contention.”
Work in the schools continued apace throughout the decade. Most notable was Assistant Director Virginia Coffey’s efforts to “raise the sights” of black students by recounting “Negro success stories.” She visited schools across the city on this mission, at the same time working with Assistant Superintendent Wendell Pierce to identify and encourage black teachers to seek promotion to administrative posts.
Coffey’s repertoire of success stories grew to include an X-ray technician, a city engineer, a beautician, a fireman, and an architect, to name a few. At Bloom Junior High students put on a play posing student actors as prospective dropouts encouraged to stay in school by other black students portraying adults who had stayed in school and “made it.” At the play’s end the real-life counterparts of the “successful adults” played by the students walked on stage and told their stories. In Bragdon’s words, “their presence and remarks were a hit, making ‘opportunity’ seem a bit more than a word.” Bolstering Coffey’s emphasis on the need to work with young people, in 1957 city council set up the Citizens’ Committee on Youth, a sister agency contracting with the city alongside the MFRC.
Bragdon summarized the MFRC’s passive role in governmental relations by noting that it functions “(1) as a consultant to government, in which role its advice is sought and participation welcomed in dealing with delicate, confidential matters; (2) as interpreter for disprivileged [sic] people needing a spokesman; (3) as a within-the-family critic, spotting errors, warning of consequences.”
In the private sector the MFRC’s objections to mounting minstrel shows at local high schools were heeded. Collaboration between the MFRC and the Cincinnati Committee on Human Relations, founded in the late 1940s, resulted in the acceptance of black students in both the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and the College of Music of Cincinnati (which would later coalesce into the University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music). A five-year “consultation” led by Virginia Coffey ended with the full integration of the local Girl Scout summer camping experience.
The MFRC was less successful, however, in urging the desegregation of Coney Island, an initiative complicated by the fact that only part of the 365-acre amusement park was within the city’s jurisdiction. Opening the park to black patrons came piecemeal throughout the decade, culminating in full desegregation in 1961, primarily through the efforts of the Urban League and the NAACP. Also unresolved was the MFRC’s objection to a union’s using racial prejudice to force a restaurant to unionize its employees by “sending its Negro members to eat there in sudden numbers,” thereby discouraging white patrons. The MFRC condemned this practice as a “cheap exploitation of racial prejudice,” but only evoked a sharp
