For most white residents the city's black population was simply out of sight and mind – people who accepted their situation without complaint. For example, Ruth Johnson told her interviewer that the reason no blacks worked on the railroad was because she didn't “think any of the black people cared to work for the railroad.” Emma Buckner's understanding of the segregated eating establishments in Warren had less to do about race and more about people belonging to different “social clubs.” The responses from these white informants suggest that the Warren newspaper was just a part of the general societal tendency toward marginalization and invisibility of the black population. Mary Homlitas, reflecting on her lack of knowledge about the issue of race, defensively told her grandson interviewer “we did what we were told to do, lived according to the law. That was it.” But others, like Merrill Hall, realized that the city was segregated culturally and financially, as “black people knew where they would be unwelcome.”8
For the African Americans interviewed, there was no doubt as to the flagrancy of Warren's racism. Olive Reese loved to go to the movies and there were three theaters in the downtown area; but in each, blacks were only allowed to “sit upstairs.” Morris Hill, who in 1966 became one of the few black police officers in Warren, recalled that the segregation was done in a way that “hid it more than anything.” “They tried to keep the segregation out of the eye of the public, but you could feel it and you could see it” if you were black, he said. Frederick Harris placed the pervasiveness African American invisibility in Warren into the larger context, explaining, “we thought this is the way it was everywhere – this is the way it works.” But he also saw the contradiction and dehumanization in the system, particularly when recalling how his mother had to go to the basement of the local courthouse to go to the black bathroom. “She was my mother – there was nothing wrong with my mother!”9
The African American informants recalled with tremendous detail the ways in which Warren made sure they stayed in their place. JoAnn Turner remembers the problems associated with buying her first house in Warren during the early 1960s. The first realtor took her and her husband to the worst areas of town and simply told them these were the only houses he would show them. Dejected, they found another agent who sugar-coated the situation better, saying up front that he would show them “the nicest that I have that you can buy.” The hurdles in the community were complex. Bertha Barber remembered the difficulty black girls had in securing a job after high school graduation: “white girls that didn't go to college went to the factories” (which didn't hire black girls), while “black girls went to the hotels and housecleaning [because] that's the only thing that we could get.” Education as a means to advancement meant little in Warren, as Muriel Robinson related that after she graduated (in the upper third of her class) she could not even get an interview when the new bank opened in downtown. It hurt her because she knew the “girls – white from her class – who got the job” to be less qualified. Black men also had to settle for low paying jobs. “Packard Electric,” James Johnson told his interviewer, “only hired people from the black community to clean bathrooms and things. They didn't work in production.” One exception to the occupational limitation was Isnell Rumph. She got a political appointment in the latter part of the 1950s as the Clerk of the City Council, an important position for a black woman at the time. Yet, she still faced the de facto invisibility of the region. She recalled that when candidate John F. Kennedy visited Warren in 1960, she posed with him along with the City Council, Mayor, Chief of Police, and other notables. However, when the photograph ran the next day in the Warren newspaper along with the story of the visit, she was “blocked out.” It upset her, but she “held [her] head up and prayed and kept on.”10
The African American respondents understood that there were many places they were not welcome. There were no signs prohibiting them, but rather an informal understanding that segregated the city. One of the most obvious places of this de facto segregation was the area's restaurants. “No restaurants would let blacks in” to eat, Bertha Barber recalled. They would however employ blacks to “wash dishes, wait tables, or work downstairs in the laundry with the linen.” Lou Tabor told his interviewer that becoming a young black adult in Warren in the late 1950s and early 1960s meant recognizing “we could not go to restaurants and be served.” After the 1964 Civil Rights Act, though, he and many others began going wherever they wanted to eat, much to the consternation of some local whites. Rosalie Price, a white resident, recalled that eateries “would not let them [blacks] sit with the white people.” Annemarie Graziosi worked in a downtown Warren restaurant at the time and when the “first black person came in” to eat around that time, the staff didn't know what to do. After the manager talked with him, they served him dinner but were afraid that “maybe if he came in other whites wouldn't.”
