Tales of Xenia Part I (1948–1962)

Living Blue in a Red Area aka Black in a White Supremacist area.

I live in Wilberforce, Ohio, home of two HBCU’s ., Central State University and Wilberforce University. I was raised in the town of Xenia, Ohio which is four miles from Wilberforce by car, but galaxies away in other ways. I was raised in Xenia, but not born in Xenia because when I was born in 1948 the only facility available to deliver babies, McClelland Clinic did not allow black women to have their children there. So I was born in Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio about 18 miles from Xenia.

Xenia began as an agricultural center but morphed into a bedroom community supporting local factories in nearby Dayton and the air force base, Wright Patterson about 12 miles away in Fairborn, Ohio. One of the reasons some folks lived in Xenia and worked in Fairborn was that Fairborn was, well into the 1960s, a sundown town where black people were not allowed to live.

My father Robert Mann and mother Melva Liles Mann were part of the Great Migration. My father was a native of Hampton, Virginia and graduated from what was Hampton Institute. My mother was from North Carolina. They moved to Ohio after living in Kentucky where my father taught at a vocational school, he taught tailoring. I had a sister Barbara , 11 years older and a brother Rober aka Moose who was 9.5 years older. I was the spoiled baby of the family. They moved to Xenia before I was born.

My mother had not been fond of Paducah because the Ohio River flooded the town too often, so they began looking for other options. He reeived a notice that a tailor was needed in Fairborn, mainly to serve the airmen’s uniform needs. So he inquired and was able to obtain the tailor shop that had been vacated when the owner died.

They could not, of course, live in Fairborn, so they settled in nearby Xenia, a town of about 25,000 souls. It has a small downtown, a decent school system, segregated, of course, when they moved there in the 1940s, and proximity to a fairly large city or two, Dayton and Springfield.

The East End of Xenia was the black enclave. Black businesss, churches, and the schools, East High and Lincoln Elmentary were all in the East End. There were barbers, beauty shops, restaurants, grocery stores, gas stations, funeral homes, florist shops, you name it except for one thing, new clothes and fine jewelry. For those you had to go to downtown or as the white people called it uptown.

We lived next door to East High School, on East Market Street, a choice location because you got to have a front row seat to one of the social centers of the East End. The Memorial Day Parade, the black part, formed in the street in front of our house, for example. They would meet the white part of the parade on East Main and be at the back of them, of course, as the parade went through town. The parade participants would split off when they got to the western part of town and the black part would march to Cherry Grove Cemetery, the main black cemetery and the white part would march on to Woodland, the main white burial ground.

We got to watch the majorettes practice their twirling batons, the band practicing their songs, the black boys in the neighborhood putting decorations of red, white and blue on their bikes. I got to watch black teenage girls in formal gowns and guys in tuxes arrive for Prom from my front porch. It was pretty much a Leave it to Beaver life except in black.

I went to Lincoln, next door to my house, separated from my yard only by the presence of the East High building. In 1957, several years after Brown v Education struck down the legality of segregated schools, the racist Xenia Board of Education decided to start integrating the schools. They did it quite slowly and it took almost ten years to finally get done.

So, the last class to graduate from East High was in 1957. That would have been my older brother’s class, but for the fact that he was a large black male. East High did not have a football team. They had a very good basketball team but for reasons, probably racist, they did not have a football team. So, my brother and three of his large friends were recruited to the white Central High School to play football. He graduated from Central.

Each year they eliminated a class and sent the students who would have been in that grade to the white schools. It would never have occurred to them to send white kids to the black school as well. The East End was a foreign land to the vast majority of white people in Xenia.

I was integrated in 9th grade in 1962. By then they had built a new high school, Xenia High and turned Cenral into one of the two junior highs along with West Jr. High. I was sent to Central which was supposedly the more bougie of the two. I worries a lot when they told us we were going to be sent to Central. I had known only three white people to any extent. Our neighbor across the street, the Harris family was composed of a white mother and black father and three off-white children. I knew Mrs. Harris because I played with her daughter Toodles who so longed to be completely white, understandable at the time.

I also knew the librarian at the Greene County Library — Xenia is the county seat of Greene County, a woman who wore her glasses dangling from a cord around her neck and despite being a librarian, shouted whenever she spoke. As an adult I realized she must have had a hearing problem. The third white person I knew was Mary L., she was a woman who looked like a Hobbit and was the school nurse. She appeared only to give us shots for various vaccines. I have forever been surprised I did not develop a dread of white people when the main one I interacted with brought pain with her every time.

So, I was worried because to me all the white people looked alike. I was afraid I would not be able to tell any friends or even my teachers apart. This turned out not to be a problem. The first problem encountered, although I really did not know about it until much later, was the fact that the racists at the school board, having given all students the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, ignored the scores of the black students ( I was told much later by one of my former black teachers that I scored among the highest of any of the students) we were all placed in basic subjects, i.e. not college prep track. My father and Bishop Ransom, one of my classmates named Louis Ransom’s grandfather, went down to the Board of Education and raised hell. Therefore, Louis and I were put in college prep classes.

The problem with this was that Louis had red hair and freckles. He might identify as black but an observer would think I, although I am a light skinned, high yellow if you prefer, black female, was the only raisin in the rice pudding so to speak.

After we were integrated I never had another black teacher. They did not want the black teachers teaching secondary subjects. Many of them who had been teaching high school at East were relegated to either elementary school or one of the junior hi schools. This was even more insulting considering that at the time many of the white teachers had graduated from some few month’s long “Teacher Colleges” while black teachers could not be hired without holding a four year degree.

My white teachers did not, to their credit, treat me any differently. As a matter of fact quite a few of them made much over me . They put me on scholarship teams to represent the school at the state level testing and I did place in French at the state level and receive a medal for my mastery of the language. Mrs. Boli, the 9th grade French teacher was one of my favorites. A very emotional woman who would cry if you did not do your homework, she pulled me aside by the end of September and informed me that I must have had a relative at one point in my history born in France since I picked up the language so quickly. She also informed me that she would no longer give me an “A” on my grade card for a 95, the usual standard then, but that I had to make an average of 97 since she wanted to challenge me to do even better.

She had me come to her house to practice conjugation and vocabulary, the first white person’s house I had ever been to. She lived next door to the Geyers, some serious racists who owned a restaurant at the time that did not serve black people, even though all of the cooks were black.

Once when I was visiting Mrs Boli to do some extended French instruction , Mrs. Geyer was in her garden weeding flowers. When Mrs. B answered the door I gestured towards Mrs. Geyer and told he considering her racist leanings she probably presumed I was coming to clean Mrs. B’s house. Mrs B., not surprisingly, I really was not thinking when I said that to her, burst into tears, promptly marched me over to Mrs. Geyer and told her I was her best French student and was at her house to get additional practice before the scholarship test. Mrs. Geyer, understandably, looked very confused as to why she was being told this and in a fairly histerical and accusatory manner.

Ah. Xenia.