COLUMBUS’ AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY

COLUMBUS’ AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY by: Sunny Martin

From slavery to Columbus they came, African Americans fleeing the South (mostly the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee) and settling in “free states” like Ohio. Columbus was a natural choice because it was one of the “underground railroad lines” for slaves traveling to other free states and to anti-slavery Canada.

Christopher Columbus Statue

The African Americans who chose, before and after slavery, to make Columbus their homes are those who shaped today’s predominantly African American neighborhoods.

Freedom did not mean “equal opportunity” in Columbus. While “downtown” and predominantly White neighborhoods welcomed African Americans as laborers, they did not welcome African Americans as neighbors. Hence, African Americans mostly settled outside the city near factories, and railroad tracks, along the banks of the Scioto River, and in rural areas adjacent to downtown.

In the beginning, African Americans were primarily employed as farmers and domestic servants for wealthy White residents. Others worked as waiters, saloon bartenders, and deliverymen.

African Americans worked on farms and in foundries, brickyards, lumber mills, and factories. African Americans provided a lot of the labor that built structures throughout Columbus.

By the thirties, the East Side was the largest predominantly African American neighborhood in Columbus. It rose from lawful and “de facto” segregation. The East Side included African American communities like the impoverished “Blackberry Patch”, which in 1941 was torn down to make way for “Poindexter Village” the third public housing community ever built in the country. Poindexter Village is now scheduled for demolition. A second notable community is “The American Addition”, a community currently experiencing new housing starts. Also, two East Side streets, Long Street and Mount Vernon Avenue offered African Americans the most in the way of homes, commerce, and entertainment.

By the fifties, African Americans of diverse cultural and educational backgrounds resided and worked on the East Side, particularly on Long Street and Mt. Vernon Avenue. The class of African American workers and residents included laborers to professionals. One could find African American physicians, dentists, educators, attorneys, nurses, policemen, firemen, barbers, artists, brick masons, musicians, carpenters, and beauticians. African Americans built beautiful homes. Also, African Americans built, owned, and operated hotels, stores, churches, beauty shops, barber shops, real estate offices, insurance agencies, laundries, gas stations, hat shops,

restaurants, and separate and unequal “colored” schools. African American entrepreneurs made African Americans less dependent upon Whites for employment and economic prosperity. African Americans had pride in their neighborhoods and themselves.

Some African American neighborhoods experienced economic prosperity well into the sixties and early seventies. This prosperity not only resulted from the hard work and resourcefulness of African Americans but also because of the contributions of Whites, primarily Jews and Italians, who lived side-byside with African Americans and owned and operated businesses in African American neighborhoods. The partnership between African Americans and Whites enhanced the vibrancy and appeal of African American neighborhoods.

In the late sixties and early seventies events, old and new, combined to end the rising prosperity and forever change African American neighborhoods, especially the East Side of Columbus. While many events may have defined today’s African American neighborhoods, none played any larger roles than the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka; the completion of Interstate 71; and the civil rights movement.

The winds of change for the sixties first began in 1954, a decade earlier, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, (1954). Hailed by some as the second coming of President Lincoln’s 1863 “Emancipation Proclamation”, the Court held that the racebased segregation of children into “separate but equal” public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was unconstitutional.

The Brown decision was significant because it overturned the separate but equal doctrine established by the Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision where it upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses (particularly railroads), under the doctrine of "separate but equal". The Brown decision became the “tool” of integration and desegregation for the decades that followed.

In the late fifties, the winds of change in Columbus, Ohio grew stronger when political leaders designed and constructed the “Interstate 71” freeway that separated “downtown” from the East Side by cutting off many of the streets that connected the central city to the East Side. African American homes and businesses were among the many structures demolished to make way for the freeway.

African Americans were displaced, and businesses and employment were lost forever. In 1962 the portion of the newly constructed Interstate 71 had reached Fifth Avenue in August, and it reached downtown in November. Hence, began the “period of separation “and “disenfranchisement” of East Side African Americans that many feels continue to exist today.

The late sixties ushered in a strong civil rights movement, a loud voice for equal rights and opportunities for African Americans. Leaders of the civil rights movement demanded the yet unrealized rights of integration and desegregation ordered in Brown. Where segregation once forced most African Americans to live and work only in predominantly African American neighborhoods, the force of the civil rights movement gave more African Americans the opportunity to live and work in predominantly White neighborhoods, including downtown Columbus.

The combination of the enforcement of the Brown decision; the fleeting success of the civil rights movement; the unrest from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King; and the isolation resulting from Interstate 71 had a profound and lasting impact on the East Side with integration and

"We are not makers of history. We are made by History."

- MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

desegregation, African Americans moved from the East Side. Some of our brightest and most talented African American residents and business owners left forever. Simultaneously, the partnerships between African Americans and Whites, particularly Jews, gradually fractured (partly because of race-based violence and rioting in the sixties) and then broke, resulting in most Whites closing their businesses and moving out forever. The foregoing, along with the neglect of political leaders, would be the blueprint for the decline of the East Side for decades to come.

Rather than be known for its resilient residents who have stayed and kept hope alive, the East Side once became known for its boarded-up and abandoned homes and businesses; blackon-black crime; “corner stores” that sold outdated and unhealthy food and beer; a decaying infrastructure that deterred new development; and a population that had declined by two thirds in fifty years. This is not the East Side that we see today.

Today, the East Side of Columbus, Ohio is experiencing a great renaissance. Life springs anew with colorful murals on abandoned buildings. Music, once silenced, now again plays in the Lincoln Theater and continues to play in the King Art Complex.

Newcomers have moved into new and old housing, and many have started businesses in projects like the Hamilton Park Place Condominiums, NOBO’s single-family homes and condominiums on North 21st Street, and the Gideon Gateway Building.

The Whitney townhouses and the Affordable Housing Trust’s offices and apartments are under construction. The Eastside is making a grand comeback!

Sunny Martin