Ohio State Employment Service (OSES), to sponsor a study of the status of black participation in the workforce and black median incomes relative to those of whites. Using the 1950 census and other data sources, the research showed “median Negro family income in 1949 was 49% lower than the median white” and that “of job orders handled by OSES in a 10-week period, 76% specified ‘white only.’”
Based on this information and the fact that the state legislature had repeatedly failed to adopt a Fair Employment Practices (FEP) bill, the MFRC issued its own report calling for a city ordinance “forbidding the practice of discrimination in employment against persons solely because of race, color, religious creed, national origin or ancestry by employers, employment agencies, labor organizations, and others.” In 1953 the report was distributed citywide to citizens, pastors, and educators, as well as governmental and social service agency personnel.
This passive distribution of the fair employment report was unsatisfactory to some. Marian Spencer, a civil rights leader and early member of the MFRC, recalls,
I felt this was an excellent report and I lobbied strongly to have the report well publicized. I proposed a speaker’s bureau and public meetings to discuss the report. Mr. Bragdon, the chair [sic], told me, “You don’t know what we’re about at the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee.” I said, “Oh yes I do, but the committee isn’t doing it.” I resigned.
The city council took four years to bring the MFRC’s proposed ordinance to the floor, failing to pass it by a single vote. Three more years would go by until “in 1959 an Ohio Civil Rights Law was passed, much more effective than a city ordinance, which could not touch suburban discrimination.” Richard Guggenheim, a member of the MFRC’s board, was appointed chair of the new Ohio Civil Rights Commission. Bragdon credited the years of research and public education it took to get a statewide FEP law on the books with a modest “The whole effort was worth doing.”
The MFRC had more tangible results in convincing Cincinnati’s Civil Service Commission to delete the question “Are you white? Colored?” from its application forms. In cooperation with the Urban League, the NAACP, and the Jewish Community Relations Council, the MFRC convinced the Commission to record racial information after employment was secured, thus preventing a priori discrimination while allowing valuable data on employment opportunities for blacks to be collated and analyzed after the fact.
Ancillary to its efforts to promote fair employment practices was the committee’s unsuccessful involvement in open-housing issues throughout the 1950s. It fought blockbusting practices in Avondale, where, despite meetings with white residents and the distribution of Not for Sale signs, white flight continued unabated. When the developers of Forest Park came to city council to contract for its water supply, a member of the council suggested including an open-housing requirement in the contract. The MFRC saw it as a “harsh dilemma” but stood quietly by as council approved a contract without an open-housing stipulation. Eleven years would pass before the suburb became racially integrated. In Evanston, Montgomery Road was considered the dividing line between black (west side) and white (east side) housing. After a black family bought a home two blocks east of Montgomery Road tensions in the neighborhood rose. According to Bragdon, “despite MFRC’s and others’ efforts to ‘contage’ calmness, the turnover was swift and frictional.” The MFRC failed to convince the Kirby Road neighborhood to allow an integrated housing project proposed by the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority. Controversy over the project caused the CMHA to sell the tract to a private developer and the development remained all-white for the following ten years.
In keeping with its inclusive policy of improving understanding of all groups in the city, the committee turned its attention to the large numbers of white Southerners that began migrating to Cincinnati during and after the Second World War. In 1954 the MFRC sponsored a “Workshop on the Southern Mountaineer,” led by Dr. Roscoe Giffin from Berea College. The committee subsequently developed a fifty-page written report that went to four printings and was used nationwide as a template for understanding the migrants’ needs and concerns. A flurry of activity occurred in the ensuing years, including surveys of Appalachian migrants, sending representatives to the annual meetings of the Council of the Southern Mountains, and follow-up workshops aimed at “explaining” the migrants to educators and medical and social service providers.
Based on the MFRC’s lead, similar workshops were organized in other cities as well. For instance, the Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago in cooperation with the Migration Services Committee of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations and the Mayor’s Committee on New Residents held an Institute on Cultural Patterns of Newcomers in October of 1957. Four sessions were held “dealing with the four major immigrant groups in Chicago: the Southern Negro, the Southern Mountain White, the Puerto Rican, and the Mexican.”
Nominations to the MFRC and its board were made by the committee itself and forwarded to the mayor, who made the appointments. Although the years between 1955 and 1960 marked the peak of Appalachian migration to the city, the MFRC never nominated an Appalachian representative to serve on the board or the committee at large. The racial turmoil of the 1960s would distract the committee from this constituency, but a reconstituted Cincinnati Human Relations Commission would return to an Appalachian focus in the 1970s.
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