Warren’s black history is nearly as old as the city itself, speaker says

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

The first black settler in Warren was a house servant who arrived in the city in 1803, five years after Warren was founded.

Anthony Carter became the first black landowner in the city in 1816, living in a small cabin on Main Street. He later became the first black landowner in Howland Township.

Warren was a key stop on the Underground Railroad, the name given to the pathways taken by slaves escaping from the South into and through Ohio in an effort to gain their freedom in the first half of the 19th century.

Wendell Lauth, a local historian, spoke at Tuesday night’s Black History Month presentation at the Warren Heritage Center on Mahoning Avenue. He said the city’s location was important because it was half-way between the Ohio River at East Liverpool and Lake Erie at Ashtabula.

The Underground Railroad brought blacks and whites together “for a mutual good,” said Councilwoman Helen Rucker, the city’s first black female council member, who also gave a presentation.

“Stops” on the Underground Railroad typically were spaced about 5 miles apart, Lauth said, adding that there were about 40 of them in the county, including a cabin in the Bloomfield Swamps, which were notorious for rattlesnakes.

Mayor Doug Franklin, himself a part of the city’s black history as its first black mayor, told an audience of about 25 people that Grace African Methodist Episcopal Church was the city’s first black church in 1887.

Frederick Douglass, a key black social reformer and abolitionist, visited Warren on March 1, 1876, at Warren City Hall, which was located on the site of the current Log Cabin on Courthouse Square, Franklin said.

Warren had its first black police officer in 1889, and the city’s first contingent of black soldiers went off to fight World War I in 1917.

Theodore Toles became the first black deputy sheriff in the county in 1942, and the city’s first black female police officer went on duty in 1945, Franklin said. Its first black firefighter was hired in 1961.

Its first black member of city council was elected in 1964. Warren native Bill White became the first black to lead a major sports organization when he became president of baseball’s National League in 1952, he said.