Cincinnati has been my home my entire life. I’ve viewed it from every conceivable angle. This city is part of my DNA.
I love it. I travel extensively in my work and I still believe that Cincinnati is one of the most underrated cities in the United States. Like many, my favorite part of returning home from the airport is that turn on Interstate 75 at the cut-in-the-hill where the skyline is sprawled out before us. It looks like the city was painted on a canvas.
But Cincinnati isn’t perfect. Ours is like any city: we have moments of past glory, but parts of our story are thoroughly embarrassing. We have skeletons in our closet. In reality, it’s more like graveyards.
Often civic supporters omit scandalous tales in a posture of protection—worried that a distressing narrative undermines their city’s greatness. But as a student (and teacher) of urbanism, I hold that cities are both humanity’s best and worst creation. I take a redemptive view, hopeful that the paradoxical nature of cities motivates us to make them better.
As a hack Cincinnati historian, I’ve amassed a significant collection of information about my hometown. One of the topics I’ve studied is race relations in our city. As a native son, I realized at a young age that interactions between black and white citizens here have always felt uneasy. Over a decade ago, I spent a week in the downtown public library researching the subject or racial relations in Cincinnati.
Now seems like the ideal time to get this info out there. More than ever, we must wrestle with our city’s failings.
Originally, this content was developed for a lecture in a college-level course on cities; I also utilized it in a sermon series I preached on racial issues. While this reflects academic-level research, the following info is presented with simplicity. Since it was meant to be communicated verbally, I would often fill in the gaps with stories off-the-cuff. Considering this, and that I edited it in a couple of hours, means this isn’t fully developed; I might skip parts of the history you believe are more important or linger on stories you think are off-topic.
I ask for grace in advance. I just felt compelled to get this notes out on the internet to help people consider our times.
If you’re interested, there are definitely other resources where you can begin a deeper dive on the topic. If you can get your hands on it, I highly suggest Henry Louis Taylor’s book Race and the City as it was most helpful in my research. Zane Miller is another Cincinnati historian that grapples with some of this content.
CITY ON A RIVER
I love to sit by the Ohio River. It’s not the most majestic waterway in America, but it’s peaceful. Like many cities, Cincinnati exists because of that river. In the early years after the Revolutionary War, the United States government was looking for a viable place to build a military outpost and the basin opposite the Licking River was deemed the ideal location.
From this place, the growth of Cincinnati was exponential. It became one of our nation’s largest cities by the start of the Civil War. It’s population growth was intertwined with our city’s economic growth. And Cincinnati’s financial success was linked to the Ohio River. The river provided unlimited commerce opportunities: goods could be shipped down to the Mississippi River, opening not only American markets but even international trade opportunities.
But the Ohio River also separated a slave state and a free state and this improved Cincinnati’s financial position. Farming in Kentucky benefited greatly from slave labor. Crops harvested by the hands of slaves could be shipped up to Cincinnati and sent downriver on a steamboat, making quite a few Cincinnati residents wealthy.
It’s important to admit, then, that the greatness of Cincinnati was built on the backs of slaves.
For the life of me, I cannot remember when I first learned this. I don’t believe I was fully taught it in school. As a young boy, when we studied local history in class, I felt a sense of pride that Ohio rejected slavery. But it wasn’t until I was an adult that I discovered the reality of slavery’s influence on the prosperity of my city. One historian suggested that, “Cincinnati was a Southern city on free soil.”
Yet there was also hope for freedom along the Ohio River. As many of us know, there were abolitionists who worked hard to liberate southern slaves. Some declared that declared, “if you make it to Cincinnati, you’ll be free.” Nearly forty percent of all runaway slaves crossed the Ohio River to gain their freedom and there were abolitionists in our city like Levi Coffin who worked to liberate them.
THE FIRST RACE RIOTS
Before the Civil War, many of our city’s black residents lived along side with whites. By 1828, approximately 4,000 blacks lived in Cincinnati (accounting for ten percent of the city’s population. In Cincinnati’s lower basin, there were two predominately black communities.
The first was known as Bucktown. It was located on the eastern side of downtown between 5th and 7th Streets and Broadway (near where the Proctor and Gamble building exists today). It wasn’t exclusively for blacks, but was the landing place for some of the city’s poorest residents. The other community was known as Little Africa, located along the river where the Banks sits today. To be clear, neither location was desirable; it was some of the worst real estate in city, prone to both flooding and the pollution of nearby factories.
Yet even though the city’s blacks had their place in the city, their existence was tenuous at best. We can trace this back to the Cincinnati’s second decade. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, laws were imposed upon African Americans in our state. In 1804 (and then again in 1807), Ohio passed “black laws.” In this legislation, blacks were not only forced to prove they were not slaves, they were required to provide a $500 bond just to live in the state (adjusted for inflation, this is the equivalent of $10,000 today). These laws dissuaded some blacks from settling in the city.
In following decades there were race riots in the city. These differed massively from how many perceive race riots today. In these instances, whites went into Bucktown and Little Africa to terrorize black residents.
Even though the black laws from 1807 were on the books, they weren’t being actively enforced. Political leaders demand that all black residents pay their $500 bond within thirty days. White Cincinnatians ransack Bucktown, starting fires and escalating violence. In response, half of the city’s black population flees. Some move to Canada while others move to nearby small towns like Ripley, Ohio.
After a few years of peace, there was another escalation in 1836. Whites in the city used a street fight between a black man and a white man as an excuse to again riot in their neighborhoods. Notably, rioters took their anger out on James G. Birney, the white editor of an abolitionist newspaper. He relocated to New Richmond, Ohio to continue his cause.
Just five years later, Cincinnati was in the midst of a challenging economic time. As many workers were unemployed, some believed that blacks were stealing white jobs. The Cincinnati Enquirer played on this paranoia and used the pages of its paper to advocate for violence against African Americans. In 1841, a new slate of politicians advocated for active enforcing of the $500 bond, empowering whites to once again riot in Little Africa and Bucktown. A sidenote: John Mercer Langston, one of the first black people elected to U.S. Congress, lived through this riot as a child.
Before the Civil War, even if you were a free black living in Cincinnati, you lived in constant fear. The passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 ensured that runaway slaves in the North must be returned to their masters; it essentially legally compelled white residents to report runaway slaves. This law, combined with the city’s proximity to a slave state, made it popular for freed blacks to be kidnapped, transported South, and forced into slavery.
CRITIQUING SLAVERY
As a resident of the Walnut Hills neighborhood in Cincinnati, I was fascinated to hear that my community was the first suburb in Cincinnati with an African American community. Understanding why this neighborhood became diversified requires us to examine a critically important but overlooked moment in our city’s history.
Lane Seminary was founded in 1829 in Walnut Hills by Presbyterians in order to train their clergy. They invested considerable funds in this seminary to prepare for our country’s westward expansion. In that era, Roman Catholicism was on the rise and, as much as blacks were marginalized, there was also a nativist suspicion toward Catholic immigrants. To prevent Catholicism from becoming normalized, Protestants were dedicated to the establishing of more churches and this required more trained clergy. This goal was so important that Lyman Beecher, at that time the most famous preacher in the United States, relocated from Boston in 1832 to serve as Lane Seminary’s president.
Just one year later, a new student arrived whose presence would loom even larger than Beecher. Theodore Dwight Weld, a white ministry student, came from Connecticut. He was a convert of famous evangelist Charles Finney, who was a staunch opponent of Beecher. Weld was a popular student and was elected the student body president. During the cholera epidemic of the 1830’s, he led students in caring for sick. But most importantly, Weld sympathized with the abolitionist platform.
In early 1834, Beecher was out east raising funds for the seminary. While he was gone, Weld convinced his classmates to host a series of debates concerning the abolition of slavery. While this doesn’t seem significant today, it was actually the first major public discussion in the United States concerning the topic of slavery. The debates took place over 18 nights, featuring mostly anti-slavery advocates. The most impactful speech was delivered by James Thome, the son of a slaveholder in Kentucky. His description of the brutality of the system convinced many listeners that the institution of slavery was immoral.
News of the debates spread around the city and major donors became angry. They had invested in the seminary in order to deter Catholicism; this abolitionist platform could potentially jeopardize key business interests connected to the slave industry. Donors pressured Beecher to stop the debates. Beecher himself was against slavery but his conviction that Catholicism was the greater evil led him to confront Weld and the abolitionists. Weld and his troop persevered, pushing administrators to admit black students. Ultimately, Beecher reprimanded him so he and forty students left to form what eventually became Oberlin College. Lane Seminary continued on nearly a century, but struggled to remain viable. It was closed in 1932.
This decline of Lane Seminary is significant to the story of blacks in Cincinnati. As administrators attempted to manage debts, they sold off seminary land. While blacks were forbidden to own property in much of Cincinnati, there was no prohibition on the property the seminary owned. A group of whites bought properties from the seminary and then immediately sold them to black citizens. This is what enabled Walnut Hills to become home of the first middle class African American Community in the city. The area between Taft and MLK near Gilbert Avenue was developed with shops and restaurants. In 1872, Frederick Douglas School was started in this area exclusively for black children. Its level of education was of such high quality that it spent years striving to exist outside of the Cincinnati Public School system; there was a fear that excellence would wane if whites were responsible for educating black students.
A BOOK FORGED IN PAIN
Even though this doesn’t cleanly fit into the Cincinnati story of race, I must at least briefly mention the Harriet Beecher Stowe. Tradition says that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in person he said, “so you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”
Stowe moved to Cincinnati with her father when he became president of Lane Seminary. Here she fell in love with and married Calvin, a professor at the school. She was already a skilled writer and used her time in the city to develop her craft. Stowe and her sisters traveled extensively in the region, specifically across the river in northern Kentucky. It was here that she was exposed to the realities of the commerce of slavery and she began to take notes of her observations. Through the Lane debates and interactions with abolitionists, Stowe developed a hatred of the institution of slavery.
Her son died in Cincinnati during the cholera outbreak of 1848. Needing a change of scenery, she left Cincinnati in 1850, moving to Maine. Stowe’s sister convinced her to write a book of her reflections and she published it in 1852. By 1854, her book had been translated into 60 different languages, with hundreds of thousands of volumes sold. It changed the country’s mindset on slavery. While she didn’t publish the book while she lived in Cincinnati, the area most certainly provided the context for Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
AN ELUSIVE FREEDOM
Many of us whites take a linear perspective of black history in America. They know that the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War freed the slaves and that it took an additional hundred years for blacks to gain full civil rights. Missing here are decades of struggle—some considerable gaps—in understanding the challenges before African Americans, especially those in our city.
There was an influx of new black residents to Cincinnati after the Civil War. A great migration of blacks fled the South in response to the racial attacks taking place under Jim Crow laws; they also sought job opportunities with which to better their lives. A significant exodus of African Americans northward took place in the 1890’s.
While the employment available to blacks always involved hard labor (in 1850, only 8% of the black working force in American held a skilled job) it was still better than the limited options in the South. Moving North also involved a cultural shift, as blacks left behind small town, rural areas for accommodation in cities. As northern industrial centers like Cincinnati saw a large influx of black residents, they had to determine where they would live.
There was already an exodus in Cincinnati’s lower basin that started in 1870s. The density of factories near the city center led to a myriad of health problems for residents, so middle-upper class citizens started to sprawl to new suburbs like Price Hill, Clifton, Walnut Hills, and Avondale. Between 1870-1940, the lower basin population in Cincinnati dropped by 50%. At the same time, the black population there increased over 700%. By 1940, 67% of the black population in Cincinnati lived in its urban core.
Many blacks lived in the West End. If you recall, the original black enclaves of Bucktown and Little Africa were some of the city’s least desirable real estate. This was the case in the late 19th and early 20th century as well. The housing west of downtown was some of the oldest stock in the city. It’s location within the river basin and east of the Mill Creek meant that it was prone to flooding.
The naïve might assume that blacks could have merely embraced the American dream to improve their lot in life. This was challenging in itself as they were not permitted to attend the trade schools needed to obtain better jobs. But even if they could somehow escape poverty, they couldn’t flee these housing ghettos even if they wanted to. The practice of redlining—government enforced housing segregation—was at work in Cincinnati. In the 1920’s, the Cincinnati Real Estate Board mandated, “no agent shall rent or sell property to colored people in an established white section or neighborhood and this inhibition shall be particularly applicable to the hilltops and suburban community.” Cincinnati blacks were stuck in the urban core with little opportunity to leave.
There were, however, some committed to making things better. In my opinion, one of our relatively unknown civic heroes was a white man named Jacob Schmidlapp. He lived in the late 19th to early 20th century (1849-1919) and was committed to improving the housing of the city’s blacks. In this era, there was a widely-held belief that African-Americans were not intelligent enough to have basic housing amenities; in black communities, cooking took place in outside kitchens and virtually all their housing in this era had outhouses. Schmidlapp saw beyond this racist rhetoric and designed new homes for black residents. He included floor plans with indoor kitchen and plumbing systems. While they were still efficiency units, Schmidlapp was able to keep costs down to build them en masse. Some of these units survive today over 100 years later; if you’re headed north on Interstate 71 just past Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, you can see some of the red-bricked units on the right of the highway.
CIVIL RIGHTS AND BEYOND
After the Second World War, the United States changed dramatically and this had massive effects on the black community in Cincinnati. The post-war baby boom was starting and it coincided with a shift in the American dream. Whereas public transportation was integral in the previous century, the automobile was staking its place as a symbol of freedom. There would potentially be no limits on where people could live and work.
The 1948 Cincinnati Master Plan was a detailed effort by civic planners to provide for metropolitan growth. The cornerstone of this plan was expanded suburban sprawl. To be fair, this concept wasn’t exclusive to Cincinnati. President Eisenhower noted how well Europe was connected by a system of roads and imagined an America were people could move quickly along the landscape. Like the rest of the country, Cincinnati city fathers embraced a future of cars (and yes, the plan even dreamed of flying cars) and this required a large-scale shift in the city’s landscape.
The proposed interstate highway system running through the city would require the destruction of numerous neighborhoods. This hit the black community more than anyone else.
Interested students can Google the destruction of the West End (specifically the razing of Kenyon-Barr, one of the most vibrant black enclaves in the city). This movement of urban renewal (referred often as “urban removal”) eliminating housing stock and forced the African American community to move elsewhere. I couldn’t find this citation, but there are records of city politicians encouraging white residents of Walnut Hills, Evanston, and Avondale to sell their homes and move to the suburbs as these would become new black enclaves. This is evident in the community identity of Walnut Hills: in 1940, just 16% of residents were black; by 1968, that number was 85%.
The 1960’s were a turbulent time in our country’s history. The effects of urban renewal policies led to white flight from urban areas. The African American community faced high levels of unemployment, leading to high number of young black man enlisting (or drafted) to serve in the military during the Vietnam War. After fighting for our country overseas, soldiers returned to the systemic racism at home. While the Civil Rights Movement advanced the cause of equity, change was slow. The race riots in our city in 1967 and 1968 reflected this frustration. Although new laws were designed to right the wrongs against blacks in America, it couldn’t undo decades of social and economic slights.
An important example of this is education. While the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 made segregation in schooling illegal, it didn’t immediately improve the system for African Americans. Cincinnati still had a segregated housing network. This, combined with Ohio’s method of education funding, meant that living in “the right school district” was key to a student’s success. Among Cincinnati Public Schools, a complex and unpopular busing plan was needed to transport students out of their own neighborhoods in order to desegregate the classrooms. Even though recent efforts to improve the city’s public schools have been helpful, it’s taken 65 years since that landmark ruling to show improvement.
In the decades after the Civil Rights Movement, there were increasing opportunities for blacks in Cincinnati to better their lives. But after generations of dealing with the Cincinnati’s racist systems, would blacks still want to remain here? The northern migration of blacks tapered in the 1960’s. With the decline of northern industrial cities, the 1990’s started a reversed trend of African Americans returning to the South; the explosive growth of Atlanta displays this trend. For blacks committed to cities like Cincinnati, there are continued challenges. Employment is still an issue in in our city, as is the erosion of basic services (the issue of food deserts still doesn’t get enough attention), and industries that prey on the impoverished like check-cashing services, cheap cell phone companies, and tax services. And gentrification, the renewal and rebuilding of deteriorated urban areas by the affluent, reintroduces housing issues.
In short, legislation has failed to reverse centuries of oppression.
Examine the topic that led to this conversation: the call for fairness in policing. The seminal moment in recent years was the killing of Timothy Thomas in April 2001 by a Cincinnati police officer. It prompted a week of riots in our city. Yet while this uprising was smaller in scale than the riots of the 1960’s, it was perhaps even more impactful to improving our city. It forced city leaders to take a hard look at reality and led to the implementation of improved policies by the Cincinnati Police Department. While this hasn’t eliminated incidents, it has undoubtedly been instrumental in changing the narrative of police relations in our city.
FINAL THOUGHTS
So as I conclude this summary, I’ll admit that even this brief view is lacking. There’s so much more we could explore.
You’ll note that I haven’t even added personal commentary to this summary. It’s not that I don’t hold opinions on the topic, but I’m not sure it’s my place at this time. My views as a white male are somewhat inconsequential. The above content speaks for itself and now we should seek black voices to guide as on how whites can participate with our city’s black community so we can continue to pursue what’s better.
My study of Cincinnati’s history convinced me that I could never fully comprehend the plight of my black sisters and brothers. For centuries, our city oppressed its black residents; sometimes it was clear as day, while other times it was more subtle. In response, our city’s white residents must acknowledge these facts and live lives that reflect this reality. We must no longer permit cognitive dissonance.
But I’ll offer one final story from recent history that illustrates the potential subtleties of the our disconnect. It starts with a book I read years ago by Mary Anna Dusablon titled, Walking the Steps of Cincinnati. She noted that our hilly city was designed with a system of staircases to help residents traverse the challenging topography. Her book moved me to appreciate Cincinnati’s steps, as they enable both the poor and rich access to our city’s beauty.
In 2005, residents in my neighborhood started a petition to close the Collins Avenue steps leading down to Taft Road. They suggested that these steps were increasing crime in the area. The city’s public works commission recommended against it and a police study affirmed that there was no actually increase in crime. Still, City Council voted to close the steps. It was supposed to only last for five years but I can’t find any evidence that they’ve actually been reopened.
To this day, I am curious as to why this was necessary. At that time, and still today, I feel that there was a racial component at work here. If I’m wrong about this, I’m very open to being corrected. But, unfortunately, I think I’m right.
The steps seem to have been closed out of an unnecessary fear. It’s a posture that has dominated relations between blacks and whites in our city for over two centuries. In this case, as it is in many, the pursuit of safety threatens our very existence. When fear is wielded as a tool of oppression, no one wins.
I view those steps as a symbol of how Cincinnati has subtly resisted change. Until the white population of Cincinnati admits our prejudices toward our black neighbors, we’ll never become the city we’ve always aspired to be.
It’s why I am cautiously optimistic from what I’ve seen by the protests of 2020. Seeing whites in great numbers march and protest with the black community is inspirational. It’s a sign of a changing tide. But it can’t be the end. The real change will be revealed when we see what our city looks like on the other side.
Cincinnati has a dark past. I pray it has a bright future.
