By Steve Rabson, GUEST COLUMNIST
I’ve been reading installments of Advance Editor Steve Watkins’ high school memoir Dead or in Jail, which he posts weekly in Pie & Chai Magazine. The fifth chapter, “Lake City”—Steve’s account of growing up in Florida where he witnessed blatant, and sometimes violent, racism—reminded me of what I saw of it too, though in my case as a teenager in the Midwest.
The expression “Up South,” the title for this essay, dates from the early days of the Great Migration when African Americans found much-improved conditions in the northern states where they settled, but still encountered some of the same barriers they thought they had left behind “Down South.”
The first time I lived in a place that had segregation was Yellow Spring, Ohio, where my father was hired to teach mathematics at Antioch College in the summer of 1953. Two barbershops and one restaurant in this small village, population 3,000, refused to serve Black customers. The movie theater had only recently ended a policy of forcing Black people to sit in the last rows of seats. Black people owned homes in the village, but the local bank refused to finance their mortgages, so they had to secure loans from a bank in the nearby city of Springfield.
My parents joined with other faculty families at Antioch to avoid patronizing these places. We ate out at other restaurants and got our haircuts at the barber shop run by by an African American, one of several Black-owned businesses in Yellow Springs. Antioch has long been known as a leading college in progressive activism for its flexible curriculum and for its many faculty and students devoted to supporting civil rights and opposing U.S. military interventions abroad. In part because a number of Antioch alumni settled in Yellow Springs and started businesses in the village, more Black people were employed and promoted in companies there than in nearby communities. They were also leaders in the village government. A Black police chief, James McKee, was appointed in 1957, and James Lawson became mayor in 1969 after serving several years on the village council.
School classes were integrated, though the first Black teacher wasn’t hired until 1956. However, the local state senator, who had earlier been mayor, spoke out publicly against interracial dating which he denounced as a result of “communist influence.” The superintendent of schools tried to ban mixed couples from the junior prom. One such couple I knew, whose parents were on the Antioch faculty, successfully defied the ban in 1959 bringing it to an early end.
In August of that year when I was a sophomore, Doug Berley, a senior, drove Phil Lawson, an African American junior, whose father later became mayor of Yellow Springs, and me to a jazz festival in French Lick, Indiana—hometown of NBA star Larry Bird. As directed in the newspaper announcement, I sent a telegram to the local Sheraton Hotel there making reservations for us the nights of the festival. When we arrived after the long drive, I went up to the front desk explaining that we had telegrammed our reservation. The clerk looked at Phil and, without even checking the box of telegrams on the shelf behind him, said they didn’t have our reservation.
That night, exhausted and starved, we went to a diner downtown to eat. We sat at a table in a place that had very few other customers since it was well past the dinner hour and waited ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, but no one came to hand out menus or take our orders. Finally, a teenage boy emerged from the kitchen, walked over to our table, and said to Phil very politely, “I’m sorry. We can’t serve you here.” This was one year before the Greensboro sit-ins in 1960. That night we ate greasy take-out hamburgers Doug picked up at a truck stop, then parked beside a field near the festival grounds, and tried to get some sleep. This proved to be difficult with the three of us scrunched up in the seats of Doug’s car dripping sweat in the sweltering August heat and swiping futilely at relentless mosquitoes.
Performers at the jazz festival included Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. I learned later that, when musicians played in such places, they stayed in private homes as guests of the families. It seemed outrageous that segregated local businesses, such as hotels and restaurants, were profiting from their performances.
The following year, 1960, saw the start of what became a major civil rights case with nationwide news coverage. Paul Graham, a Black Antioch alumnus and Yellow Springs resident, was refused service at Gegner’s Barber Shop. He filed a complaint with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission supported by the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P.. At first Lewis Gegner, whose son Steve was our high school classmate, claimed he didn’t know how to cut African American hair, something he hadn’t been taught in barber school.
A few weeks later, David Epstein, a white professor in Antioch’s music department whose hair had the same texture, went to the barbershop and Gegner cut his hair without objection. Later, when the case went to court as Graham v. Gegner, the barber changed his claim and said he was a private businessman who had the right to choose his customers. At this point, he obtained local support from a group called the “National Association for the Advancement of White People.”
After the case dragged on for four years, local residents and Antioch students, frustrated by the many delays and referrals, organized demonstrations that included pickets and sit-ins. On March 14, 1964, 500 protestors marched along Xenia Avenue, the village’s main street, carrying signs and singing “We shall Overcome.” Around noon, squads of police arriving in patrol cars from the Greene County sheriff’s office poured into the street and rushed the demonstrators with billy clubs, tear gas, and fire hoses, arresting 108. A front-page photo of the chaotic scene in the Antioch college newspaper showed police grasping billy clubs as they approached a group of demonstrators. The caption read, “This IS the South.”
The case was scheduled to be heard by the Ohio State Supreme Court later that year, but with passage of the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act that outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, it was declared moot. Lewis Gegner retired and closed his shop.
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Dr. Steve Rabson is a retired professor emeritus of the Department of East Asian Studies at Brown University, and currently an adjunct instructor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Mary Washington.
