It was 1943, and Washington Clark wasn’t going to let Hitler kill him – not after he’d made it this far. He worked at the Rossford Ordnance Depot in Wood County, an army installation that doubled as a storage plant, and that, he decided, was as close to the military as he was getting. He sent for his children in Grenada, Miss.
The mother of his long-deceased wife issued a warning: “If you can’t treat these kids right, leave them where they’re at.”
With that she put them on the train – Henry Clark, 10, and his sister Joette, 8 – and off to Toledo they sped. The young Clarks spent the night awake, wondering wide-eyed out the window at the lights dancing across the water.
“First time I seen electric lights,” Mr. Clark, now 87, recalled. “Didn’t know what they was.”
And so Mr. Clark and his sister made the 800-mile trip north that their father had made eight years earlier, and that millions of African-Americans had made since the first shots of the first World War were fired in 1914.
“They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done,” wrote Isabel Wilkerson about the black migration north in The Warmth of Other Suns. “They left.”
The Great Migration, as it came to be known, unfolded in waves through 1970. It totally reshaped the social, cultural, and economic landscapes of both the North and the South. Toledo played an important role in the Great Migration, to be sure, but perhaps just as important is the role that the Great Migrants played in Toledo.
You’ll Do Better in Toledo
Nearly a century before the Great Migration, Toledo had, by an accident of geography, found itself a common destination for free blacks. It was one of the final stations of the Underground Railroad, as the east and west lines converged on Perrysburg. Three years after the city was incorporated in 1837, 54 African-Americans were among its 1,188 residents, according to the sixth U.S. Census. That number grew to 115 by 1850. By the end of the 19th century, about 1,060 of the city’s 81,434 residents were black.
The outbreak of World War I halted the supply of immigrant labor from Europe at a time when industries, increasing product output in response to the war, needed more manpower than ever. Thus once unavailable employment opportunities opened for black men in the industrial North, and so the northward migration of southern blacks began in earnest around 1915.
Toledo was not the most popular destination. Of the half million African-Americans estimated to have left the South by 1920, about 60 percent relocated to the large urban centers of New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Chicago. The last had, in fact, been the original destination of Mr. Clark’s father. He didn’t last a year. “Chicago, if you go there broke, you leave there broke,” said Mr. Clark.
So Washington Clark became part of the remaining 40 percent that opted for humbler cities like Toledo. For people like Charles H. Barnett, a native of western Tennessee, it offered the best of both worlds: the superior employment prospects of industrial cities paired with the rural comforts of home. Mr. Barnett, who settled out in the Stickney area, went on to become the first black man employed by the Textileather Corp.
Stickney, located in the northern portion of the city, quickly established itself as one of the main destinations for black migrants arriving in Toledo. Other areas where African-American communities formed included the city of Rossford, as well as around Manhattan and Pinewood avenues.
Between 1910 and 1930, the number of black residents in Toledo ballooned by more than 336 percent, soaring from 1,877 to 13,260 – about 4.6 percent of the overall population of 290,718. By 1970, blacks represented 14 percent of Toledo’s population. Today, that number is closer to 30 percent.
The Free North
Norman Bell arrived in Toledo as a fresh-faced 24-year-old, graduated from a Louisiana childhood of working as an ice boy for a dollar a day and a college career as a part-time janitor. He didn’t know anybody in the city but “my cousin, Jesus, and God.” What he did know was what his cousin had told him: “I was in the free North.”
Mr. Bell’s discovery that maybe the North wasn’t so free came when he attempted to find a table at Grace Smith’s Cafeteria. He was “gently told” that he could pick up an order from the back, but that he wouldn’t be seated. It was 1957.
LeRoy T. Williams, in his unpublished 1994 dissertation at the University of Toledo called “Black Toledo: Afro-Americans in Toledo, Ohio, 1890-1930,” concluded that “the influx of migrants only served to intensify the existing prejudice and segregation in the city.”
In 1915, as racial hostilities began flaring across the city, Albertus Brown and Charles Cottrill established the Toledo chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Its early string of successes included preventing the theatrical presentation of the racist film Birth of a Nation, pressuring the local press to begin capitalizing the “N” in “Negro,” and, in 1918, getting “White Only” signs removed from downtown restaurants.
The NAACP waged its most significant battle against the Ku Klux Klan, which frequently held parades in downtown Toledo throughout the 1920s. The Klan’s Toledo chapter had about 1,500 members, as compared to the 2,500 in Cleveland and the more than 10,000 in Columbus, but still made its presence deeply felt.
“There was more Jim Crow in Toledo than there was in North Carolina when I first came here,” Stickney resident Nellie Harris told Kimberly Caldwell, who compiled an oral history of Black Stickney in her unpublished 2001 dissertation at Bowling Green State University. In North Toledo, some black residents recalled, they weren’t allowed to live north of Ketcham Avenue, near the Polish neighborhoods, and feared getting caught west of Mulberry Street after dark.
Compared to cities like Akron, Toledo rarely witnessed racial violence. Occasionally, though, the steady simmer of racial resentment erupted into boiling, scalding brutality. After a black man purchased a house on the 300 block of Willard Street in East Toledo on Aug. 12, 1929, a crowd of white residents gathered after nightfall and, before several indifferent policemen, smashed every window in the wooden-frame house before setting it on fire.
A decade earlier, 146 whites had signed a “pact” calling for the exclusion of blacks from “Vinal, Albert, and adjacent streets” in East Toledo – foreshadowing the establishment of “Neighborhood Improvement Associations” that limited the housing available to blacks.
Thus it came to be that Toledo, which in 1871 had become the only city in northern Ohio to desegregate its schools, witnessed the hardening of geographic and social divisions between blacks and whites throughout the 1930s. By the 1940s, Nara Schoenberg observed in a 1996 article for The Blade, “housing segregation was the rule, not the exception.”
Up South
Writing for The Blade in 1952, William Brower argued that even college-educated blacks would find the best employment prospects at Rossford Ordnance Depot rather than in private industry. At the time, the army installation where Henry Clark’s father worked had 5,500 employees, of which 2,400 were black. A decade later, it was gone.
It was around then, in 1961, that the younger Clark began working as a barber. He’d graduated from Macomber High School in 1952, served in the Air Force for four years, and now, after learning how to cut Caucasian hair at Andrew Barber College, was learning how to cut black hair on the job. In 1971, he opened his own barbershop, then Poor Clark’s – a cheeky title that referenced not his childhood poverty in Mississippi, but his present-day success. Since then, Clark’s Barber & Beauty Shop has become a community staple. Adorning its walls today are civic awards from churches and nonprofit organizations.
Mr. Clark is but one of the many migrants, and their descendants, that made the most of Toledo, no matter the obstacles, and thus remade Toledo. Indeed, as far as he’s concerned, about 80 percent of the people who made a living and started businesses in the Glass City came from the South. “Immigrants is what built this country, from my point of view,” he said, whether they came to the United States from overseas, or to Toledo from elsewhere.
In 1900, nearly 45 percent of Toledo’s black residents were native to Ohio. By 1930, more than 45 percent were from Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. Mr. Bell, in his first job as an insurance agent in the late 1950s, met so many Toledoans from states like Georgia and Mississippi that “it seemed as if I’d moved from down south to up south.”
Even a small sampling of Toledo’s southern pioneers in a handful of fields makes for a lengthy list. In education, Flute Rice, the last born of 14 children in Huntsville, Ala., became the first black principal of Scott High School in 1968.
In journalism, Kansas native Frances Alexander Belcher founded and published The Bronze Raven in 1948 before becoming one of the city’s first black radio program hosts – an 11-year-run from 1950 to 1961 on WTOD-FM that won her the nickname “Lady B.”
In politics, Wilma Brown arrived in Toledo from Birmingham, Ala., in the late 1940s as a timid teenager. More than 60 years later, in 2010, she was elected as the first female leader of city council.
“What We’ve Done”
Mr. Clark has outlasted a lot. He has outlasted the heyday of Dorr Street, a “black downtown” popping with churches, restaurants, theaters, and bowling alleys that stretched from Washington Street to Detroit Avenue, where his barbershop now sits. He has outlasted his sister Joette, who passed away in 2000 as a graduate of Maumee Valley Hospital School of Nursing, former director of undergraduate nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, and manager of Toledo’s minority health commission. He has outlasted most migrants like himself, and like his father.
As noted by Robert Smith, director of the African American Legacy Project of Northwest Ohio, most migrants and their children are either in their 90s or deceased. The coronavirus pandemic has only accelerated the historical losses.
Mr. Bell, too, at the age of 88, has watched his peers pass on. But he and his wife Ora are content with their legacy. Not necessarily their achievements, though neither lack in that department. Mr. Bell retired as Toledo’s affirmative action chief after 27 years of public service, which he followed with another three decades serving more than 20 international and domestic organizations. Mrs. Bell, meanwhile, spent decades as a personnel administrator and social worker, before devoting her retirement to civic and religious volunteer work. Both have master’s degrees.
For the couple, though, their true legacy is the children they raised: Norman Jr, a pharmaceutical district manager in Atlanta; Keith, former superintendent of the Euclid City School District; Shawn, a former employee at General Motors; and Michael, the second black mayor in the history of Toledo.
"They grew up right here, in the ghetto, right here in this house," Mr. Bell said, gesturing around the humble, 130-year-old bungalow on Stickney Avenue. "We’re an asset to the community, we’re not a liability. That's what the Bells are doing over here in the ghetto. That's what we've done."
First Published January 31, 2021, 1:30 p.m.
