Former educator and long-time Warren-area resident Cliff Johnson looked relaxed and comfortable sitting for his interview. When asked what he remembered best about the 1950s and early 1960s in the small northeast Ohio city of Warren, he talked about the separateness that permeated his world and his discomfort with this invisibility: “I personally would rather have someone call me a bunch of dirty names and at least acknowledge me as a person than to act as if I wasn't even there.” Being invisible for Johnson was “probably the worst thing to ever do to a human being.”1
Historians studying the United States after 1945 have begun to investigate the effect and pervasiveness of the Civil Rights movement on a local, less visible level. How did ordinary Americans, particularly outside the South, act and react to the social and legal revolutions that swept the country through 1965? The people from Warren, Ohio, offer an interesting case study through which we can begin to provide insight into the complexities of this question. While many of the area's white residents would agree with their neighbor Delores Capan that “there was no problem here,” the recollected experiences of many African Americans assembled as part of this oral history project suggest otherwise. Not only do these reminisces reveal a division over how Warren residents recalled their collective past, they also point toward how these perceptions affected everyday life and policing of this community. Perhaps most significantly, the fact that the white majority believed the racial situation was not problematic suggests the very temper of the invisibility African Americans faced and suggests a larger collective meaning of the Civil Rights era on the city level.2
In order to better understand this era and its effects on this local population, in the fall of 2003 we co-taught a course at Kent State University, Trumbull, entitled “Documenting Justice: Civil Rights in Warren, Ohio.” The foundation of the course involved teaching the students the theory and methodology of oral history and then, working with them, interviewing local white and African American residents who were young adults during the period 1954-1964.3 We chose the period after 1945 because it corresponds with the emergence of the modern Civil Rights movement, many of those who lived through the era were still alive and cogent, and enough time had passed to allow for ‘honest' responses. Using methodologies outlined by Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis, Joan Sanger, Ronald Grele, Michael Frisch, and Paul Thompson, Bindas compiled a list of questions* in the form of life narrative, supplemented with policing questions developed by Merryman.4 The responses were added to traditional textual evidence gleaned from the local newspaper , The Warren Tribune Chronicle, NAACP and Urban League reports, census data, and appropriate secondary literature. Taken together, these sources paint a picture of a small northeast Ohio town in the midst of a social transformation. While rarely spoken, the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement – that all people have the inherent right to equality – encouraged both races to examine their community and attempt to reconcile the way things had always operated with the apparent way things were going to operate. Warren residents' recollections and how they frame them provide valuable light into this era and help provide the necessary backlight to understanding the impact of the larger national movement.
*See appendix for life narrative questions
Page 1 of 10, Next>>
