Friday, September 23, 2016
YOUNGSTOWN
In the early morning hours of Oct. 7, 1972, the Rev. Kenneth Simon – then a teenager – thought he heard his family’s furnace explode.
“There was smoke all in the house,” recalled the Rev. Mr. Simon, pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church.
What Mr. Simon quickly learned, however, was that the explosion was no accident: Someone had fire-bombed his father’s car while it was parked in the driveway of the family’s South Jackson Street home on the East Side.
The Rev. Lonnie K.A. Simon – Kenneth’s father – was a well-known civil-rights activist as well as a member of the city schools’ board of education, and was facing backlash at the time after being arrested at a football game at South High Stadium while trying to help break up a fight.
The attack, detailed in a front-page Vindicator article, occurred well within the 50-year period during which Kathy Miller, now-former Mahoning County chairwoman for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, maintains that racism was not an issue in the United States.
Miller, who is in her late 60s, resigned from the volunteer position Thursday after controversial remarks she made to The Guardian went viral.
In a video, Miller – who is white – told a Guardian reporter “I don’t think there was any racism until [President] Obama was elected.”
But members of the community contacted by The Vindicator quickly identified numerous examples, both anecdotal and recorded in newspaper archives, of race-related tensions, and discrimination against blacks, during Miller’s lifetime.
Just a few years before the attack on the Simon family’s home, tensions on the city’s South Side erupted after the April 4, 1968, assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The South Side “exploded with such violent civil unrest for three days that the Ohio National Guard was called in and a curfew imposed,” reads “These Hundred Years,” a book that chronicles the 20th century as recorded by The Youngstown Vindicator.
Riots began anew in summer 1969, this time on the East Side.
“The riot produced curfews, liquor bans, and martial law. When things died down, nine had been injured and 26 arrested,” the book notes.
Segregation of blacks from whites also was a reality in Youngstown, both officially and unofficially, into the 1970s.
“There was, in this area, implied segregation,” said Bill Lawson, Mahoning Valley Historical Society director. “It governed, into the 1950s, where you sat in the movie theater. The schools were not segregated, but neighborhoods in this area were very segregated, not only by race, but by ethnicity.”
Lawson also detailed segregation in the Youngstown workforce, particularly in the steel industry, until after World War II.
“When new people arrived at the steel mills, they started out at the bottom,” Lawson said. “Prior to the unions having industrywide representation in the 1940s, the only way people got ahead was when one person got promoted. ... When he did that, he hired his brothers, and sons, and neighbors, and cousins, and anybody he knew who needed a job. So each of the departments was highly segregated by ethnic group.
“That was all well and fine, except for African-Americans, because never had an African-American been promoted into a supervisory or foreman position, because they stayed” in the worst positions, Lawson said.
Mel Watkins, who grew up in Youngstown in the 1950s and became the first black staff editor at the New York Times Sunday Book Review, recalled getting kicked out of the Warner Theatre in downtown Youngstown for defying blacks’ segregation to the balcony seats.
“The theaters were segregated. Restaurants were segregated. Everyone knew their place, and most people stayed in them,” he said.
In his 1998 memoir, “Dancing with Strangers,” Watkins shared the experience of his childhood friend, Alfred F. Bright, a renowned artist who became the first black full-service Youngstown State University faculty member.
Bright, who was on a baseball team with mostly white players, had to sit outside the gate of a public pool while the other players had a picnic there.
Watkins himself faced prejudice while he was a student at South High School.
“I had a white school adviser who urged that I not go to college, because I wouldn’t be able to get a job anyway – even though I had scholarships to various colleges,” he said.
It troubles him that someone like Miller, who is close to his age, could be blind to the systemic racism that permeated life here and across the country.
“The legacy of racism, and the impediments to black progress, stem from that racism that certainly was quite obvious in the ’60’s when she graduated,” he said.
Jimma McWilson, vice president of the NAACP’s Youngstown branch, encountered segregation shortly after moving to Youngstown from Alabama when he was in eighth-grade.
In 1959, McWilson’s mother told him to go to a Market Street store to get change.
That’s the first time he ever heard the N-word.
“I opened up the door and the man in the store said, ‘What do you want? We don’t serve [N-word] here,” McWilson said.
“I didn’t know what to do with it because I didn’t know what it was.’”
When he told his mother what the man said, she told him to go to another store and called the offending store owner an idiot.
While racial tensions and racism might not be evident to Miller, they are all too evident to black people in Youngstown today, Mr. Simon said.
“Even in Mahoning County, we’re making progress, but we are still dealing with racism. I had to deal with it in school, I had to deal with it in employment, I have to deal with it when I go to the store,” he said. “If I’m not dressed in a suit and tie, you get people following you around like you’re a suspicious criminal.
“People need to walk a mile in your shoes before they say something crazy like, ‘There’s no racism.’”
Contributor: Denise Dick, staff writer.
Some Vindicator headlines about racism over the years:
June 9, 1970: “North Siders tell council of racial tension.”
March 29, 1973: “Urban league official cites agencies. Finds blacks shortchanged.”
June 16, 1976: “An estimated 300 black men met on North Side Tuesday night to plan a July 3 march and rally to protest what they describe as attacks on the city’s black leaders.”
Jan. 16, 1984: “Progress for blacks in Youngstown area has hit racial barriers and ‘stalled,’ two religious leaders said today at Martin Luther King Day Program.”
April 8, 1986: “Black leaders warned today that they will try to stop all federal money from coming into Mahoning County unless local governments and the business community begin addressing the needs of the black community. Also prepared to ask U.S. HUD to investigate federally funded local programs and are considering legal action against the country and Youngstown.”
April 10, 1986: “Black Leadership Summit Council took its ‘state of emergency’ to Ungaro administration and Council yesterday demanding more aggressive aid to minorities.”
Dec. 8, 1987: “Federal mediator confirms rift between Youngstown Police Dept. and the black community.”
Jan. 6, 1990: “A confrontation between a large crowd of white males and females and a small group of black males resulted in the arrest of two 19-year-old black men this morning near YSU area bars.”
July 15, 1992: “Blacks allege racism in school board pick of new superintendent, want apology.”
Jan. 18, 1998: “Blacks say they remain in bondage and think whites need to work harder at racial reconciliation, speakers at annual MLK Day events said.”
Dec. 1, 2003: “Blacks’ income gap is wider than among whites, new analysis shows, with Mahoning County having the greatest gap between rich and poor blacks in Ohio.”